Anna Karenina, at the Théâtre de Sceaux: the faultless performance of Rimas Tuminas

There is this wonderful scene that we remember. It's about this comical and oh so cruel moment when the magician Tolstoy is at the top of his art. Remember, this takes place at the St. Petersburg train station. Alexei Karenin, a high and dull civil servant, welcomes his wife. Anna arrives from Moscow. And what does she notice about her poor, honest husband? The disproportionate size of his ugly ears. She had never focused on Alexei's ears because she had never really looked at her husband. He was part of her life. It was there like a sort of piece of furniture. But since she fell in love with Vronsky, she wonders how she could live like that, without passion, without purpose.

Director Rimas Tuminas made this scene incredibly moving. Rimas Tuminas, 72, is a celebrity in his native Lithuania. He founded the Maly Theater there in 1990. In Moscow, where he directed the Vakhtangov Theater from 2007 to 2022, he was admired. He mounted War and Peace there, in 2021. But the torments of history deprived him of his homes for various reasons, especially that of supporting kyiv. End of Russian history? Not really. One project haunted him: directing Anna Karenina. At the invitation of the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv, the city where he was exiled, he made his wish come true. And this is how we can see Anna Karenina in Hebrew. We are not knowledgeable enough to judge the translation but this language, to the ear, buzzes like a bee or a bumblebee.

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In the role of the dull Alexei, Gil Frank is luminous with precision, disconcerting in the pity he inspires. As for the beautiful Anna, she is played by the beautiful and pale – brown curls on her white throat – Efrat Ben-Zur. “ Enchanting was her firm neck surrounded by a row of pearls,” wrote Tolstoy. There's something terrifying about Anna's charm. She has an extraordinary dramatic intensity and it took a hell of an actress to interpret the moral sense of this woman. She gives herself entirely to Vronsky (the handsome Avi Azoulay) making fun of the social scandal.

Of course, parallel to the story of Anna and Vronsky, there unfolds that of the calmer and more touching loves of Lévin (Miki Leon) and Kitty (delicious Roni Einav), a dreamy and delicate woman. The scene - all in mime, like a silent film - where she takes care of their cozy house is irresistible. Levin is the opposite of Vronsky. It is peasant common sense that seeks to elevate itself spiritually. Their relationship aims for a certain ideal, based on mutual respect. Thus, the play oscillates between the happiness of the couple Lévine and Kitty and Anna's slow descent into hell. “ Love cannot be exclusively carnal because it is then egocentric and therefore becomes destructive,” Nabokov wrote, about Anna, in his Literatures II.

The piece, intelligently scripted, begins, after an opening under the great organ, with the domestic scene in the Oblonski house where nothing is going well. Anna's brother Stiva (the bouncy Alon Friedman) is a jumper. As for Dolly, his poor wife (Karin Serouya), she has a series of pregnancies. We are immediately caught in the net of Tolstoy revisited by Tuminas. Between comic and pathos. The decor reduced to its simplest expression allows the viewer to imagine everything. On the gray-colored stage, three benches, two chairs. An uninhabitable setting, more of a place of passage where we meet, where we despise each other, where we embrace each other. A no man's land which would be the place of the inner troubles of each character.

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Respecting spatial and temporal realities was the director’s challenge. Challenge taken up over a little over two hours of spectacle with the holy scents of the Russian soul. We can only have compassion for Anna, caught like a fly in the web of inexorable misfortune, and a certain contempt for her lover Vronsky, this boy with a mediocre mind, exasperated by Anna's jealousy. Poor Anna, who knows that one day or another, she will pay the high price for her adultery.

Ah!, that moment when, at the opera, no one dares to sit next to her as if she were plagued. Driven to despair, Anna throws herself under a freight train. Here, the director does not lack panache. The benches will act as locomotives and wagons. We leave the theater a little overwhelmed by this grandiose love story. Needless to say, this show – built like a gallery of paintings often mixing bewitching dance and music – responded to our curiosity. Of relentless beauty.

Anna Karenina, at the Théâtre Les Gémeaux, Sceaux (92). Until January 28.