Actor-turned-playwright Lesley Hart says Anna Karenina is not a romcom but a ‘rom-trag’. Leo Tolstoy’s novel, all 800 pages of it, is a story of high passions that lead inexorably to a bad end. No sooner has she set off across Russia to help her womanising brother rescue his marriage, than the central character falls for a wealthy young cavalry officer and knocks her own marriage off course.

^{Picture: Mihaela Bodlovic}

Published in instalments between 1873 and 1877, Anna Karenina is about people trying to find their true selves in an age of social flux. Played in this production by Edinburgh’s Lindsey Campbell, Anna is a woman striving to do things her own way, resisting the moral condemnation of an aristocratic society which is itself falling apart.

‘She joins countless other women in history who are punished for not adhering to the rigid roles created for them by the patriarchy,’  says director Polina Kalinina. ‘Lesley and I love her because of how hard she tried to live truthfully. She isn’t perfect; she is often a bit of a hot-mess express. But that just makes her more gloriously human. Her resistance is ruthlessly punished.’

It has no doubt helped Hart’s adaptation that Kalinina is a native Russian speaker (her Twitter profile says she was ‘born on a Soviet sleeper train’), allowing her to get close to the source material. ‘Polina and I were keen to find an authentic voice for the play, something gutsy, witty, sexy, gritty, rooted in Tolstoy’s original and true to me,’  says the playwright. ‘We did a lot of work directly from the Russian text, with Polina sending me raw off-the-page translations as voice notes and me working from the transcripts.’ Adding her own voice as a Scottish playwright, she hopes to bring ‘the kind of raw energy that can sometimes get lost in translation.’

Anna Karenina, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Saturday 13 May–Saturday 3 June; Bristol Old Vic, Wednesday 7–Saturday 24 June.