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Fortune's Fool is that rare thing, a funny, satisfying and emotionally rewarding evening at the theatre.

Thomas Burke

 t h e a t r e

IT MAY BE your opinion that the last thing Manhattan needs is another drunken windbag, the kind who ruins dinner parties by driveling and ranting through every course, spitting food and sloshing wine. But please let Alan Bates help you to reconsider this social prejudice.
Mr. Bates, you see, is playing just that sort of man, a fellow whom liquor turns into a logorrheic, napkin-slinging nightmare, in "Fortune's Fool," an Ivan Turgenev play some 150 years old that is only now receiving its Broadway premiere. And oh what a lovely bore Mr. Bates turns out to be. This charisma-packed British actor - who became a renegade matinee idol in the 1960's with films like "Georgy Girl" and "King of Hearts" - returned to the New York stage last season (after a three-decade absence) in Yasmina Reza's "Unexpected Man." But his stately, teasing performance merely hinted at the fireworks he is still capable of releasing.
For at least 15 minutes of "Fortune's Fool," which opened last night at the Music Box Theater, Mr. Bates brings out the Roman candles, and it is a spectacle no lover of acting should miss. Playing a shabby, self-effacing Russian aristocrat, Mr. Bates turns one sad fellow's humiliating moment of drunken grandstanding into a triumph of timing, technique and continuously startling insights.
Not that "Fortune's Fool," as a whole, calls for the uncorking of Champagne. The production is indeed the occasion for the fabled director Arthur Penn to return to Broadway after 25 years, and it features a deliciously overripe Frank Langella. Yet the show soars into celestial realms only when Mr. Bates and his fellow performers are in their cups.
The play, which has been liberally reshaped in Mike Poulton's well-spoken adaptation, was created by a 30-year-old Turgenev, still discovering his literary powers. "Fortune's Fool" is blessed with the sort of dazzling, quick-stroke character portraits one associates with his "Sportsman's Sketches" of the same period. Structurally, this study of aristocratic ennui and anxiety in provincial Russia is much less confident.
A chronicle of the disruptive events precipitated by the return of the young heiress Olga Petrovna (Enid Graham) and her new husband, Pavel Nikolaitch Yeletsky (Benedick Bates, son of Alan), to her country estate, "Fortune's Fool" feels like only half of a fully realized play. Teetering between psychological comedy and Victorian melodrama, it features one plot-wrenching revelation that ends the first act in a thunderclap, followed by a long second act of highly sentimental explanations.
It is not by story alone, in other words, that "Fortune's Fool" will captivate an audience. Even more than the plays of Chekhov, whose lineage can be glimpsed here, "Fortune's Fool" demands thick atmospheric smoke and gleamingly detailed idiosyncrasies.
Mr. Penn's production has visible bald spots throughout. John Arnone's shiny sets and Jane Greenwood's period costumes have the synthetic look of something freshly removed from plastic wrapping. And when the curtain goes up on a gaggle of serfs busily cleaning house, they bring to mind some vintage Ruritanian romance in which peasants burst into happy song.

That this will not be the case is evident as soon as the elder Mr. Bates takes the stage in a threadbare black suit and a hesitant walk that is redolent of apology and defensiveness. He instantly registers as both a type, the sort of parasitic poor relation common to 19th-century European fiction, and a disturbingly real individual.
This two-leveled portraiture was a specialty of Turgenev, and it is a thrill to watch how Mr. Bates and Mr. Langella translate writerly finesse into actorly language. That their fellow performers never rise to the same level of heightened verisimilitude gives the production a wobbly quality, as if it were walking on one neatly fitted high-heeled boot and one very flat bare foot.
The story, like Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard," begins with the arrival of cosmopolites in the countryside, where they are awaited by locals eager for excitement. Mr. Bates's Kuzovkin, a penurious, self-described gentleman who has been living on the estate for two decades, is especially eager to see the new bride, whom he remembers adoringly as a little girl.
Then there is the effete, French-spouting landowner Flegont Alexandrovitch Tropatchov (Mr. Langella). A man of wry politesse and rococo mannerisms, Tropatchov is a part Mr. Langella could play with his eyes closed.

Fortunately he keeps his eyes open, revealing in them a glinting, manipulative malevolence that comes from being clever and bored in a stagnant society. While Mr. Langella is nearly always funny, he is ultimately as cuddly as a cobra. His Tropatchov may be a cartoon, but it is of the sort drawn by Goya and Daumier.
It is Tropatchov, with the help of his pet nobleman Karpatchov (Timothy Doyle), who initiates the diversion that comes to seem as vicious as bear baiting. He gets Kuzovkin drunk at dinner in the presence of the bridegroom and then makes him talk about his hobbyhorse, a longstanding lawsuit of Dickensian dimensions.
Mr. Penn steers this remarkable scene into a mixture of subtlety and flash that confirms his formidable reputation as an actor's director. As Mr. Bates rambles through the convolutions of an incomprehensible list of grievances, replete with genealogical annotations, Kuzovkin is by turns hilarious, pathetic, frightening and finally almost tragic.
An entire wasted life, the stuff of which long Russian novels were made, is in this monologue. Mr. Bates finds astonishing and revealing variety in the splintered dignity of a man who literally used to sing for his supper at the table of Olga Petrovna's father, now dead.
His fellow performers - who also include George Morfogen - are all expertly on-target, tracing the swell of drunken giddiness into barbaric cruelty.
The second act, which takes place the morning after, often feels like a hangover in ways that go beyond the plot.

The emphasis shifts to the uneasy, three-sided relationship among Kuzovkin and the newlyweds. Ms. Graham and Benedick Bates do not begin to generate the kind of complexity required here.
Ms. Graham's straightforward, poised primness has little to do with her character's emotional effusiveness. And Benedick Bates is far too genial to justify the descriptions of Yeletsky as cold. This means that Alan Bates winds up acting for three, and he relies on some heroic posturings that shortchange a character who should remain to some degree ambiguous.
On the other hand - and it is a big hand - this does not displace the searing vision of Kuzovkin's brilliantly charted free fall at the dinner party. Drunk scenes usually find performers making the most of the chance to behave sloppily. This one, as led by Mr. Bates, genuinely finds that elusive veritas in the vino. |||

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

SPRING ARRIVED in New York last week, and with it came the sounds of the season: from sidewalk cafes, the gentle clash of silverware and china; from open taxi windows, the sound of baseball games in progress; and from Broadway stages, British accents.
The advent of a flock of London stage imports has become one of the city's rites of spring, as producers rush to open shows before the cut-off for the Tony awards -- Broadway's Oscars -- at the end of April. If it's not Judi Dench in "Amy's View," it's Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle (OK, so she's American-born) in "The Real Thing." If it's not the Donmar, it's the Almeida -- if indeed it's not both.
This year has been a bit of an anomaly. September 11 cast a pall over the autumn season both in New York and London, and there was some question as to whether investors on either side of the pond would lose confidence. But as it has turned out, the number of shows on Broadway this spring is up over last season, and London imports are thick on the ground.

British actors, however, really haven't been. The Broadway season's four major West End transplants -- "Mamma Mia!," "Noises Off," Trevor Nunn's "Oklahoma!," and Terry Johnson's most unwelcome stage adaptation of "The Graduate" -- are essentially free of Anglo acting. The only British performer recreating a role from one of the London productions is Josefina Gabrielle, Laurey in "Oklahoma!" Perhaps that's why the appearance of Alan Bates, in a new adaptation of an obscure Turgenev play, was greeted with such happy rapture by most of the city's critics -- even if the production as a whole wasn't. The New York Times's Ben Brantley began his tepid review of "Fortune's Fool" (at the Music Box Theatre) with a veritable paean to the actor, calling Bates's Act I drunk scene "a spectacle no lover of acting should miss".
Most of the rest of the production's notices similarly focused on the success of Bates's alternately poignant and comic portrait of a down-at-heel Russian aristocrat, alongside the rather more flamboyant turn of Frank Langella as his foppish nemesis.
From the warm reception, you wouldn't know that Bates is, in fact, appearing on stage here for the second time in as many seasons. Last winter, he starred with Eileen Atkins in the US premiere of Yasmina Reza's "The Unexpected Man," an Off-Broadway highlight.
But prior to that, it had been three decades since Bates's last New York stage venture, his Tony-winning performance in "Butley," which he recreated on film. Bates was then a major film name, with "Georgy Girl" and "Women in Love," among many others, to his credit.
His currency in Hollywood has since declined. But his performances on stage here -- not to mention his brief but superb appearance in "Gosford Park" -- signify that Bates is still an actor at the top of his form.
In fact Bates's experience of the ups and downs of an acting career could be seen to inform his tender and touching performance in "Fortune's Fool."

Bates's Kuzovkin is a penniless aristocrat who has been collecting dust on the country estate of an old, long-deceased friend. The events of the play follow upon the arrival of his late patron's long-absent daughter, Olga (Enid Graham), who has come to take up residence with her new husband, Yeletsky, who is played by Bates's son Benedick. (Father and son in fact initiated these roles in Mike Poulton's new adaptation of the play at the Chichester Festival in 1996, although the Broadway production is otherwise new.) Watching Bates register Kuzovkin's simultaneously agonised and elated reaction to Olga's arrival -- will she even remember him? Will she let him stay? -- is our first indication of the delicacy the actor brings to even the most broadly comic moments of the play.
Chief among these is the drunk scene that closes Act I, in which Kuzovkin is baited by Langella's mischief-making Flegont into describing the complicated series of outrages that resulted in the loss of his rightful inheritance. Kuzovkin begins the tale with the careful humility of a man who has lived his life as a hanger-on, in ingratiating and reasonable voice. But the champagne begins to flow, the memories take over, and as he regales his listeners with the labyrinthine saga of his 27-year lawsuit, he loses sight of the present -- and the sneers of his companions -- and becomes intoxicated both by liquor and by the sweeter balm of recollecting his claims to gentility, however tangled they may have become.
Bates's performance of this bravura set-piece is both acutely amusing and acutely painful. The comedy comes from the actor's crisp sense of the humour in its Dickensian detail and the passionate precision with which it is delivered even through an alcoholic haze. The pain arrives when Kuzovkin is rudely awakened from his sweet delusions by the humiliating recognition that his saga is seen by others as an elaborate joke -- the look of desolation on Bates's face tears at the heart.

Bates's blending of the piteous and the comic in this scene is, in fact, more artful than the production and perhaps even the play itself. Turgenev wrote several plays before concentrating on prose, but only "A Month in the Country" survives in the general repertoire. "Fortune's Fool" lacks the grace and subtlety that marks both that play and his prose fiction. It is unevenly directed here by Arthur Penn.
Whether Bates's efforts will be recognised when the awards are doled out is another question. He is facing significant competition, much of it from fellow Brits. From last autumn, there is Ian McKellen's widely celebrated turn in "Dance of Death," and in the next weeks Broadway will be welcoming two more London bred productions with formidable male stars, "Private Lives," with Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan, and Simon Callow recreating "The Mystery of Charles Dickens."
By the end of April the quotient of Brits on Broadway should have achieved its usual healthy levels -- a small but reassuring sign in a city still measuring the fall-out from the calamitous events of September. |||

Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Limited

New York. IT'S SOMETIMES a quick leap from comedy to cruelty, a fact demonstrated with unnerving clarity in "Fortune's Fool," Ivan Turgenev's dissection of mid-19th century Russian country life.
And when the comedy -- and the cruelty -- are provided by such gifted actors as Alan Bates and Frank Langella, you expect a first-rate evening of theater. They and the production, which opened Tuesday at Broadway's Music Box Theatre, do not disappoint.

"Fortune's Fool," in an accessible adaptation by Mike Poulton, is a human and humane play, depicting the foibles of the landed Russian gentry with perception, wit and affection. Director Arthur Penn and his large cast have done a skillful job in creating its stratified world of nobility and servants.
Bates plays Kuzovkin, the fussy, almost fluttery title character, a self-described "court jester" befriended by a wealthy family and allowed to live on its charity for some 30 years. Now the newly married daughter of his long-dead benefactors has returned home with her husband and there is the possibility Kuzovkin will be thrown out on his ear.
"Never anything of my own. Can you imagine the effect that has had on my soul?" murmurs the man, who dresses like a cleric, wearing black priest-like garb with a white collar. He exudes a nervous energy, a genial dithering that masks a genuine anguish.
Bates is remarkable in carefully negotiating the man's foolishness and faith. That balance holds him in good stead during the play's most theatrical scene: when Kuzovkin drunkenly reveals a family secret.
In the scene, Bates caroms around the stage, egged on and plied with champagne by a foppish neighbor and estate owner, Tropatchov. This gentleman is portrayed with malevolent glee by Langella, giving the plummiest performance on Broadway. The character smirks, poses, switches into affected French or Italian, nd generally delights in causing discomfort to others. Langella, all raised eyebrows and melodious tones, makes it funny and, more important, believable.

Tropatchov humiliates the inebriated jester, turning what begins as a scene of high hilarity into one of heartbreaking mortification. It couldn't make for a better first-act curtain.
Yet there is more to the play that the savagery of Kuzovkin's humiliation. Bates gets to show another side of this extraordinary character in Act 2, when he confronts the young woman who has inherited her parents' estate.
Enid Graham plays her with an almost noble dignity, matching Bates in his quest to maintain Kuzovkin's honor while the world crumbles around him.
Penn has cast the rest of the characters with care. Benedick Bates -- Alan's son -- blusters effectively as the officious new husband; Timothy Doyle simpers with effete charm as Langella's penniless companion; and George Morfogen is properly mournful as Kuzovkin's sober-sided good friend.
Set designer John Arnone has provided the necessary birch trees (after all, he play is set in the Russian countryside) which peek out from above a warm, wooden-beamed garden room in Act 1. The young bride's airy, white-and-blue drawing room fills the stage after intermission.
In the theater, Turgenev is chiefly known for only one play, "A Month in the Country," which deals with much of the same society as "Fortune's Fool." This second, little-known effort is a worthy addition to any theater's repertoire. But it needs a talented actor in the title role. Fortunately, in Alan Bates' accomplished and affecting portrait, Broadway has such an artist. |||

"A gentleman must live with dignity even when the whole world laughs at him," insists Vassily, the anguished hero of Ivan Turgenev's Fortune's Fool. He has learned this lesson the hard way. A Russian nobleman by birth, he has been cheated of his estate by conniving relatives and forced to live on the charity of a wealthy aristocrat, who made him the butt of humiliating mockery and abuse. His attempts to hold on to his pride, one imagines, must have made his debasement all the more amusing.
Vassily's cruel patron has been dead for years as the curtain at the Music Box Theatre rises on Arthur Penn's richly enjoyable production of the play. The servants are frantically preparing for the arrival of Olga, the old master's daughter and heiress, and her new husband Paul. Vassily, who has continued living on the estate, has not seen his beloved Olga since she moved to Petersburg as a girl, and has dressed in his only suit for the occasion. As played by the magnificent Alan Bates, Vassily has a reflexive self-deprecation that comes from years of debasement; he has a slight sniffle, and he speaks in fussy bursts, as if worried that he will be boring. His eagerness to see Olga has a pathetic quality at first -- she does not even remember his name -- but it becomes clearer when Vassily is goaded into revealing a terrible secret about her past.
Turgenev is perhaps second only to Chekhov in the ranks of Russian dramatists, but his plays are performed less frequently. Fortune's Fool, seen here in a fine adaptation by Mike Poulton, has the feel of a classic, yet it has the freshness of unfamiliarity. And while the play has its share of Siberian gloom-"I have thrown away my last hope of happiness," worries Vassily at one point -- it is more broadly comic than Chekhov's works, and ends more happily.

The comedy comes largely at the hands of Frank Langella as the flamboyant Flegont, an "infamous, fatuous fop" who owns a nearby estate, and who pops by to stir up trouble; he has his own browbeaten jester in tow, a bankrupt aristocrat whom he calls "Little Fish" (Timothy Doyle, who looks like the Mad Hatter without the madness and hat). Flegont is a gossipy monster of self-delight -- a vicious dandy with an otiose drawl, laboriously trilled "r"s, and a propensity to slip into French-and Langella has glorious fun with the role. He does not just chew the scenery: first he marinates it, sautés it, sauces it, and garnishes it with berries. (John Arnone's rather drab set could have used a little garnishing, actually, though it has been handsomely lit by Brian Nason.)
Penn's direction is active and cohesive, drawing out the strengths of his talented cast. Enid Graham is poised and sympathetic as Olga, and Bates's son Benedick is correctly callow as her unsettled husband. Also strong are George Morfogen as Vassily's worried friend, and Lola Pashalinki and Edwin C. Owens as senior servants. But the evening belongs to Bates, especially in the long and dazzling scene that closes the first act. Plied by wine and champagne, and taunted mercilessly by Flegont, Vassily gets drunker and drunker, until finally his old wounds come bleeding out in anger. Bates inhabits Vassily's shame with exhilarating skill and humanity. You leave the theater feeling tipsy with admiration. |||

THERE IS A sublime and almost euphoric pleasure only felt when watching genuinely talented people plying their craft. Pay a visit to Fortune's Fool, which opened tonight at the Music Box theatre, to experience it for yourself.
Arthur Penn has directed Mike Poulton's savvy adaption of Ivan Turgenev's minor play with his usual intelligence and style, making easily accessible the story of great humor and that particular Russian sense of high tragedy which verges on the absurd. What we have here is, thanks to two great performances, the funniest serious play currently running on Broadway.
Alan Bates, as a destitute nobleman, and Frank Langella, as an interfering neighbor, are brilliantly matched, each playing against and off the other in a pair of the best realized performances this season. Watching them possess the stage as to the manor born, one has a sense of deja vu, of catching glimpses of grand performances from some long vanished golden era when legendary actors trod the boards.
In a uniformly strong supporting cast, two deserve special notice. George Morfogen, friend to Bates' impoverished nobleman, and Timothy Doyle, Langella's "Little Fish," both make an impression which far exceeds the size of their roles. Doyle in particular has several moments in which an economy of effect plays tellingly in context.
The elements of the physical production - set design by John Arnone, costume design by Jane Greenwood, and lighting design by Brian Nason - blend together seamlessly and evoke a genuine rural Russian period feeling. The sound design by Brian Ronan is good enough to go unnoticed.
Fortune's Fool is that rare thing, a funny, satisfying and emotionally rewarding evening at the theatre. And under Penn's direction, Bates and Langella are not to be missed! Fortune's Fool is the first genuine "must see" this season. |||