A Month in the Country at the Donmar Warehouse
A Month in the Country played at the Donmar Warehouse in Seven Dials from 22 August to 3 October 2026.
2 hours 20 minutes, with an interval
At Donmar Warehouse, near Covent Garden
This show has closed
This run at Donmar Warehouse has finished.
Who's A Month in the Country For?
- Anyone who came for Sophie Okonedo. It was her first show at the Donmar and she was on stage for most of the evening.
- Anyone who wanted Turgenev funny. Lyndsey Turner directed it as a comedy, and the critics who arrived braced for Russian gloom said so with some surprise.
- Anyone who wanted to be close. The Donmar's own line is that nobody sits more than four rows from an actor, and this production played out on a lawn a few feet from the front row.
About A Month in the Country at the Donmar Warehouse
A glass box packed with foliage sat over the stage. It lifted to reveal a drawing room whose furniture had been carried out onto a lawn, and it came back down between scenes. Leslie Travers designed it, and it was the first thing anybody who saw the show talked about.
Lyndsey Turner directed a company of twelve, which is a lot of actors for this stage. The costumes put it in the later nineteenth century and the setting stayed Russian.
The billing read "by Brian Friel, After Ivan Turgenev" rather than "translated by". Friel gave the servants and the neighbouring landowner an Irish ear, Patrick Gibson played the tutor in his own Irish accent, and the comedy came out in rhythms an English-speaking audience hears straight away.
What's A Month in the Country About?
A country estate in Russia in the 1840s. Natalya Petrovna has a wealthy husband in Arkady, a settled house, and a family friend, Michel, who has loved her quietly for years and never done anything about it. A young tutor, Aleksey, arrives to teach her son.
Natalya falls for him. So does her seventeen-year-old ward, Vera, and Natalya sets about marrying Vera off to a much older neighbour to move her out of the way, with the estate doctor brokering the match for a fee.
The damage is all done in conversation over one hot summer, which is why so much of it can be played for laughs.
Performance Schedule
The run played eight performances a week, with no Sunday performance, and ended on Saturday 3 October 2026.
| Day | Matinee | Evening |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | - | 7:30pm |
| Tuesday | - | 7:30pm |
| Wednesday | - | 7:30pm |
| Thursday | 2:30pm | 7:30pm |
| Friday | - | 7:30pm |
| Saturday | 2:30pm | 7:30pm |
| Sunday | - | - |
An evening performance was out at about 9:50pm and a matinee at about 4:50pm.
Cast and Creative Team
Sophie Okonedo played Natalya Petrovna. Patrick Gibson played Aleksey, the tutor; Alistair Petrie played Michel, the family friend who never declares himself; Daniel Rigby played Shpigelsky, the doctor who does most of the scheming; Rachelle Diedericks played Vera. Mark Hadfield, Susan Brown, Thomas Arnold, Michael Hodgson, Amanda Wilkin, Jonathan Livingstone and Jessica Brindle completed the twelve.
Lyndsey Turner directed. The full company and the creative team are in the Cast and Creatives tab.
Where to See A Month in the Country Next
No transfer or tour has been announced. Sign up and we will tell you if A Month in the Country comes back to London.
FAQs
No, that is a different story. The 1987 film comes from J. L. Carr's novel about a man uncovering a wall painting in a Yorkshire church. This is Turgenev's Russian play, in Brian Friel's version.
A married woman on a Russian country estate falls for her son's young tutor, and so does her teenage ward. Over one summer the household's arrangements come apart. Friel plays much of it as comedy, and so did this production.
2 hours 20 minutes, including an interval.
Saturday 3 October 2026, after a run that began on 22 August. It was not extended.
Both, and the comedy was the surprise. Turner directed it closer to a screwball comedy than to the melancholy piece Turgenev is usually staged as, and the hurt underneath it was still there.
None were published for this production.
Where to Sit at the Donmar Warehouse
For this production two levels wrapped round three sides of a stage at the floor of the auditorium, and the middle of Stalls rows B and C was the seat to ask for. The Donmar rebuilds its auditorium for every show, so the notes below describe this production's layout, not the next one's.
For the next production here, our guide to the Donmar Warehouse goes row by row.
Dates & tickets
Getting to the Donmar Warehouse
The Donmar Warehouse is at 41 Earlham Street, Seven Dials, London WC2H 9LX. The entrance is easy to walk straight past: a small doorway with a neon sign over it, on the left as you come down from Seven Dials, beyond the shopping mall entrances.
Covent Garden is three minutes away on the Piccadilly line. Leicester Square is five, Tottenham Court Road and Holborn eight, Charing Cross ten. Buses stop at Cambridge Circus, a few minutes up Earlham Street: the 14, 19, 24, 29, 38 and 176 by day, and the N5, N19, N20, N29, N38, N41 and N279 at night. None of them stops outside the theatre.
The run had captioned and audio-described performances, and no BSL interpreted or relaxed one. Bars, parking, access and everywhere worth eating nearby are in our Donmar Warehouse guide.
Address
41 Earlham Street, Seven Dials, London WC2H 9LX
Nearest Tube
Covent Garden
A Month in the Country Cast
| Role | Performer |
|---|---|
| Natalya Petrovna | Sophie Okonedo |
| Aleksey Belyayev | Patrick Gibson |
| Michel Rakitin | Alistair Petrie |
| Ignaty Shpigelsky | Daniel Rigby |
| Vera Aleksandrovna | Rachelle Diedericks |
| Arkady Islayev | Thomas Arnold |
| Anna Islayeva | Susan Brown |
| Afanasy Bolshintsov | Michael Hodgson |
| Lizaveta Bogdanovna | Amanda Wilkin |
| Herr Schaaf | Mark Hadfield |
| Matvey | Jonathan Livingstone |
| Katya | Jessica Brindle |
This was the company that opened on 22 August 2026. Some sources call Alistair Petrie's character Michael, and older editions of the play call him Rakitin; the Donmar bills him as Michel.
Creative team
Version by Brian Friel, after Ivan Turgenev. Directed by Lyndsey Turner.
Design by Leslie Travers. Lighting by Tim Lutkin, with Zoe Spurr as consultant lighting designer. Sound by Max Pappenheim. Music by Angus MacRae. Movement direction and intimacy by Anna Morrissey. Dialect coaching by Elspeth Morrison and Mary Howland. Casting by Lotte Hines CDG.
A Month in the Country Reviews
Press night was 2 September 2026. No national newspaper went above four stars and none went below. Four stars came from the Guardian (Arifa Akbar), the Times (Clive Davis), the Financial Times (Sarah Hemming), the Evening Standard, the Independent, Time Out, the Stage and WhatsOnStage.
Every notice led on Sophie Okonedo. Hemming called her wonderfully complex, almost Hedda-like in her deviousness and self-loathing, both self-obsessed and pitiable. Akbar wrote that she plays Natalya as a haughty, controlling snob while keeping the compassion in her. Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard had her imperious and girlish at once.
It is funnier than the billing suggests. Critics who came expecting Chekhov found something closer to a period comedy, and the ones who liked it best said the humour and the hurt are held in the same hand. Akbar called it a delicate, tragicomic tangle of desire and disappointment. Alice Saville in the Independent wrote that Turner prunes the play into a witty, approachable form and leaves all its thorns intact.
The reservation runs the other way from the praise. The Stage and the Arts Desk both said the comedy is bought at the cost of the tension underneath it, and Saville, in a positive review, wrote that the lightness of tone sometimes makes it hard to see the pain the play is built on.
On the casting itself there is an argument. Writing for LondonTheatre.co.uk and printing no rating, Julia Rank found too much natural gravitas in Okonedo's Natalya and a forced coquettishness, and put Alistair Petrie's Michel forward as the performance of the evening instead.
Daniel Rigby's scheming doctor is the other performance critics kept picking out, though not unanimously. Curtis called it a lovely study of on-the-make calculation; Vera Liber in the British Theatre Guide thought the comic playing did not come off.
Leslie Travers' set drew the heaviest praise after Okonedo. Akbar described a glass box of foliage like a verdant bell-jar lifting to reveal the drawing room. Curtis read the box dropping onto the grass as the characters being trapped by their own feelings.
