In the case of drunks, most people prefer to keep a safe distance. But the one on marvelous display in Mike Poulton's adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's 150-year-old, 19th-century play is a drunk of the highest order. Playing a rumpled, shabby Russian hanger-on named Vassily Semyonitch, Alan Bates gives a towering portrayal of a man whose world has crumbled on him, and in Fortune's Fool's penultimate scene, Bates performs an extended drunk bit that impresses by how un-technical Bates plays it. It is a masterful bit of characterization, as his unsteady cadences and slowly de-evolving gait get the best of him as he is plowed with alcohol at the behest of Tropatchov (Frank Langella, ripping up the stage), a garrulous, self-pleased neighbor who delights in ridiculing the poor sap. But Bates uses every bit of Vassily's sad dignity in the scene as well, which transforms it from mere skill to something more valuable. Nothing else in Fool is quite as arresting, but for a stretch of roughly 10-15 minutes, you're in acting heaven.
Director Arthur Penn (the famed helmer of "Bonnie and Clyde") returns to Broadway after several decades, and his handling of the piece is tasteful and elegant. The material, though, can be rickety, coming off as being about less than it presumes. Poulton's translation is lucid and respectable, but fireworks are in short supply, except when the two mighty leads command the stage, which is most pleasingly quite often. The story also concerns Vassily's reunion with a former tenant of the house he resides in on charity, a well-to-do young heiress named Olga Petrovna (Enid Graham), who remembers Vassily from childhood. She arrives with her new husband (Benedick Bates, son of Alan) (whom she lovingly refers to as merely Paul), and the latter has inherited the Russian estate. He plans to become lord of the manor but hasn't prepared himself for the personalities of Vassily and Tropatchov that, while contrasting, set everything in motion.
The remainder of the cast isn't as powerful as Bates or Langella. Bates Sr.'s offspring Benedick is adequate but completely unsurprising as the young husband, and Graham is woefully miscast as a worshiped daughter of privilege, always seeming too icy and contemporary for the amount of compliments she receives from the other characters. A few supporting roles are filled out nicely, especially George Morfogen's Ivanov, a friend of Vassily's, and Timothy Doyle, who has nice moments as Tropatchov's somewhat younger kept boy.
Fortune's Fool doesn't quite uncover the hypocrisies of upstairs-downstairs life with quite the same vigor as, say, Robert Altman's "Gosford Park," and the events are too drawn-out at times to maintain steadfast interest, but the play is good company while it lasts and the rare that doesn't treat the audience like the latter half of its title.
