A Parable of Destiny

War and Peace. When a massive novel is adapted for the stage, what the playgoer almost invariably sees is the skeleton of the book and the embryo of a play. A sense of events and characters killed for lack of space, of people and relationships underdeveloped for lack of time is present in this Phoenix Theater presentation of the Tolstoy classic, but it has an evocative life that refuses to be smothered. Thanks to Ellis Rabb's inventive direction, a substantial fraction of the surge, scope and thematic intention of the novel comes over the footlights.

The device that knits the evening together is that dramatic vice, a narrator, whose luckless duty is to tell the playgoer why, for the moment at least, there is no play going on. When the actors take over, War and Peace springs to life--life with all its joyous, grievous and profound trivia, its indestructible reality. Children are born, men and women marry or do not marry, father fights with son and son with father, the old die. Peace is love, war is evil. In war, the young die, husband is torn from wife, the round of daily life is violated and reversed; yet Tolstoy's instinct for portraying the tenacious domesticity of existence makes war seem the great interrupter rather than the great destroyer.

In a performance of flinty authority, Sydney Walker plays the old Prince Bolkonski, an aristocrat who tyrannizes his nearest and dearest and who paradoxically loves and is loved by them. His dying words to his daughter, "Put on your white dress. I always liked it," have the poignant impact of mortality that only the greatest writers achieve with the simplest of sentiments. His son, Prince Andrei (Donald Moffat), has the ache of desolation in his face, a man who goes off to war because death has already claimed his heart. As Andrei's love-tossed, love-lost Natasha, Rosemary Harris is spunky, vulnerable and unutterably feminine.

Against this private world, Tolstoy posed the public world of events, and the use of ingeniously flexible stage levels keeps the two worlds in ironic interplay. The public world reverberates with social reforms, patriotism, the trumpeted, and trumped-up, goals of nations and of wars. In Tolstoy's view, these are vampires of abstraction that suck real blood. The pinnacle of abstraction, as he sees it, is the great hero Napoleon. While the battle of Borodino is clumsily enacted onstage like a mock-up war game with wooden soldiers and generals, Tolstoy pursues the point that Napoleon did not have the foggiest idea how the battle would come out, and only a fumbling control over its course.

There is a certain intellectual arrogance in a man of letters judging a man of action, but Tolstoy was undeterred by that, and War and Peace might be called Napoleon's second Waterloo. Tolstoy's thesis was that the multitudinous whims of chance, rather than the decisive will of a great man, determine history. War and Peace thus helped to foster an antiheroic philosophy of history that has gradually depopulated the modern novel and drama of heroes. But Tolstoy's own generalship, his vast marshaling and deployment of esthetic forces, never faltered. A century after his masterpiece was published, it is his hand of genius, immune to chance and change, that decisively grips the Phoenix stage in a parable of individual and collective destiny.

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