AustLit

'"Anyone who has read Michael Blakemore's classic novel "Next Season" knows he is one of the best writers we have about how life on-stage may feed into life off. His beautiful new memoir, "Arguments with England", is perhaps better still - a pitch-perfect account of dreaming youth, driven, frustrated and eventually deepened by a realistic love of the theatre". (David Hare). In the days when Australians called England 'home', Michael Blakemore, an eager young man en route to RADA, made the long sea voyage to 1950s London to find himself in a distinctly foreign country...And so began his struggle to come to terms with the realities of a less than perfect Promised Land. Candid observations about life and art, from his shock on witnessing the poverty in the North to his sense of excitement on reading the works of Proust and Webster, sit beside colourful escapades at drama school and recollections of working with characters such as John Osborne and Tyrone Guthrie. Rescued from the horrors of weekly rep by an exhilarating tour behind the Iron Curtain in Peter Brook's "Titus Andronicus" with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, Blakemore recalls life as an actor before his directorial success with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg propelled him to the National Theatre and the start of a glittering career.' (Publication summary)

Adapted from the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, Country Life is set in Australia ca. 1919. Alexander Voysey, who has been living abroad for twenty-two years, returns with his new and much younger wife Deborah to the estate in the country where his daughter Sally and brother-in-law Uncle Jack live. Another character is Dr Max Askey. A free-thinker and something of a playboy, his ideas clash with the conservative town folks. Deborah's popularity with the local men quickly becomes apparent. Although she and Max develop a passion for each other nothing eventuates. Sally, meanwhile secretly desires the older doctor, but her feelings are unrequited. Alexander eventually decides to sell the estate but is foiled by Jack, who by then realises that his brother-in-law is a fake. Alexander and his wife are subsequently forced to leave in search of greener pastures.

Country Life draws parallels between its Russian model and the Australian setting, with most of Chekhov's original story intact.