Review | Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer is 'stellar' in Anna Karenina at Chichester Festival Theatre

Within its 800-plus pages, the Russian author covers the institution of marriage, the double-edged sword of technological progress and even the meaning of life, told through the lives and loves of several couples alongside the titular protagonist.

The challenge for a playwright is how to condense such a sprawling scope into a couple of hours of theatre?

Phillip Breen is the man who has taken on the task for this CFT production, both adapting and directing this production which had its global premiere in Tokyo.

And by and large he succeeds – although l have doubts over the running time.

Playing the title role is Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer, making her Chichester debut.

On screen, she has made a name for herself playing seductive and ambitious femme fatales, including her breakthrough role as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors.

And she certainly delivers on this front, making her affair with a high ranking member of society that ends in disgrace utterly convincing.

But she was more than just beguiling: I also found her descent into paranoia and all-consuming guilt for choosing her lover over her son to be similarly compelling.

When she’s on the stage, it’s hard to take your eyes off her.

When Anna interacts with her dutiful but tedious husband Karenin and lover Vronsky, they also performed their inner thoughts to the audience – which created an interesting tension around the performative nature of relationships and what trust means.

But at times, it was not clear enough what was being said ‘out loud’ and what was in their head – which made these scenes a tad confusing.

Her tragic love triangle is offset by different types of relationships: Anna’s philandering brother Stiva and his long-suffering wife Dolly, and Dolly’s sister Kitty and her devoted husband Levin.

While the latter, which is loosely based on Tolstoy’s own marriage, does offer a hopeful foil to Anna’s downfall, it also pulls some focus from the central narrative; I found Anna’s death to be anticlimactic as a result.

It also helped to contribute to a three-hour running time, with an interval, which is a marathon by any standards – and I did find myself flagging by the end.

There were some confusing staging choices too, such as projection of the word ‘death’ above a scene involving Levin’s brother Nikolai, which felt out of place with the style of the production.

Overall, it was an ambitious production with a stellar central performance – but perhaps bit off a few more pages of the novel than it could chew.

Until Saturday, June 28.