LEO TOLSTOY’s War and Peace
dramatized by Timberlake Wertenbaker
BBC Radio 4

www.bbc.co.uk
 

On a misty grey New Year’s Day, BBC radio 4, a speech station in England broadcast a 10-hour audio play version of War and Peace by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, a book I have only recently discovered.

The play takes us on Pierre Bezukhov,’s journey through Russia’s Napoleonic wars. It follows too the story of peace, love and learning to live through hard times.

In parallel to Pierre’s story is that of the charming Rostov family. Warm, generous and containing the spicy and petulant Natasha, we travel with them too through the random cruelties of war back to domestic serenity.

The story is told as a bed time story on a Russian winter’s day to the children of the Rostov and Bezukhov families. We lose the urgent wry charm of Tolstoy’s voice for the functional necessity of shrinking a 2000 page text into a radio play.

Pierre Bezukhov is played by Paterson Joseph. Joseph works the words well. From stuttering, passionate lost youth to a true found man at the end of the play, he performs the part with a warmth and intelligence which will surely lose him to film and TV companies in America who are able to distinguish talent from melanin. Phoebe Fox’s performance as Natasha negotiates with sensitivity and wit, the transformation from her frantic teenage persona to a woman who sits lovingly at the death bed of Prince Andre, her one time fiancée, with compassion and acceptance. Her own mother, played by Lesley Armstrong conveys the frivolous Moscovite matron dealt the intolerable death of her dear youngest son Petya in the French invasion battles of 1812. The eminent and worldly John Hurt plays the irascible agnostic Prince Bolkonsky. His gruff exterior belies his intense love for his daughter. In moments of crisis he encourages her to study mathematics. ‘I brought you up to be an intelligent woman.’ barks Prince Bolkonsky after news of marriage proposal to his daughter Marya, played by Natasha Little. He then sets her homework and goes for his angry walk in the snow. Tolstoy’s women and his desire for them to realise their intellectual and emotional strengths are one of the many draws to his work.

Recorded on location at Borde Hill House in Sussex, scenes often echo with stone walls and resounding footsteps. Doubt and argument over the possibility of war with France fills the clattering fine china plated and crystal glassed evenings of St Petersburg dinner tables. Stephen Warbeck composed the specially arranged music for elegant Moscovite soirees and the Cossack whirls of the great post hunt evening enjoyed by Pierre and Natasha when she dances as a ‘real Russian.’ At the christening of Prince Andre’s grand son, Russian Orthodox prayers are sung atmospherically with the soulful deep Russian choir.

But Tolstoy wanted us to know about what real war is like. The play captures both the intensity of battle scenes in the great set pieces in the Battle of Borodino and Austerlitz and the intimacy of characters’ own experiences. Recorded at Tvarozna in the Czech republic, they are replete with the clash, hammer and sordid sorrow of real battle. These scenes convey both the excitement of the book’s depictions of the vivacity and surreal comedy of war.

“How beautiful the sky is,” says Prince Andre as he lies wounded after at the Battle of Austerlitz. Later as Pierre Bezukhov marches as a bloody footed political prisoner of the French, he notes too the beauty of the forests and the heavens. On this march he meets my favourite character of the book, the wise and compassionate Platon Karataev, played in lilting north of Ireland accent by Patrick O’Kane. In truncating the text, much of Platon’s peasant wisdom is omitted as is Tolstoy’s extensive treatise on the benefits of Russian freemasonry.

It’s a big book. Originally written in installments, like much of Hardy and Dickens’ work. To make it into a radio play necessitated some edits … but its heart is true, funny, compassionate and wise, which is what Lev Tolstoy would have wanted.

— Rosa Redoz

*This play is available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer until the end of January 2015