Last night, Nell and Luiza headed down to The Arcola to watch the Piano Removal Company's new production of Anna Karenina. Here's Nell's review...

I’m afraid to say that most of my recollections of Russia involve local beer, numb fingers, cigarettes that tasted of polystyrene and mustard-coloured buildings the size of mountains. I was 17 and my trip to Moscow and St Petersburg was part of a fairly hedonistic A-level History course.

So, it was rather a treat to be able to get another glimpse of Russian aristocracy without even leaving my postcode, thanks to the Piano Removal Company’s production of Anna Karenina at The Arcola.

Anna Karenina is a story of adultery, marital frustration, social convention and land distribution within one upper-class Russian family in the late 1880s. Which, you may think, doesn’t lend itself to the music of Peter Sarstedt and chair acrobatics.

However, using the adaptation of Helen Edmundson and under the direction of Max Webster, this titanic novel became a design-heavy mix of music, movement and theatre with some of the soundtrack performed live by the actors, and some provided by an interesting collection of 20th-century pop.

At times, the sheer quantity of props and the complexity of the stage design became distracting, rather than enriching, and the clanks and scrapes of chairs, tables, lamps, sticks, instruments, trays and desks were not always justified by their effect on stage. However, when they got it right – when a church scene was created by trays of nightlights, for instance – they got it very right indeed.

It was also a shame that the emotional pitch of the show began, and remained, quite high, which by the end of the hour and a half first act became a little much. But both Luiza and I agreed that the show went from strength to strength during the course of the evening.

Before I go, I must also mention that Andy Rush, who played Count Vronsky was what my grandmother calls "easy on the eye" and the singing by Zoe Claire and Sophie Waller was fantastic.

Nell