Eugene Onegin review – lovestruck and snowblind in St Petersburg

Although Pushkin’s novel in verse has yielded a famous opera and ballet, it has rarely been dramatised. Watching this production, conceived and directed by Rimas Tuminas for the Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia, I began to understand why. It is, as Pushkin’s biographer TJ Binyon points out, a work of extraordinary literariness: what you end up with on stage, for all Tuminas’s inventiveness, feels like an illustration of a great poem, rather than its essence. The basic story is well known: the lovestruck Tatyana, having been spurned by the Byronic dandy of the title, in turn rejects him when she becomes a married St Petersburg beauty. Tuminas wittily frames the action inside a ballet-school, makes imaginative use of a vast, shifting mirror, and has two actors playing the older and younger Onegin and Lensky, the poet he kills in a duel. Tuminas also creates a series of unforgettable images. The hopelessly smitten Tatyana pounds the pillows of her bed with the frenzied ardour of Shakespeare’s Juliet. Her passage to St Petersburg is accompanied by a blinding flurry of snow. Best of all is the sight of her as a society hostess whose captive conformity is echoed by six white-gowned chorines on swings. Freeze the action at any moment and you would have a memorable image. But, for all Tuminas’s visual gifts and skilful use of music ranging from folksongs to Offenbach, it remains a strangely undramatic affair. As a shredded version of Charles Johnston’s English translation hurtles across the surtitle screen, I felt we were seeing a picture-book version of the poem. Eugeniya Kregzhde brings a fine impetuosity to Tatyana, Sergei Makovetskiy exudes the right regretful lassitude as the older Onegin and the veteran Ludmila Maksakova makes a striking impression as an imperious dance-master. But, although the Russian speakers around me were in ecstasies, I missed, over close to three-and-a-half hours, the speed and lightness of Pushkin’s poem.

• Until 21 February. Box office: 0845 120 7511. Venue: Barbican, London