http://www.ffolio.com/abarchive/stage/fool.html

November 2001 update:
A FOOL FOR B'WAY
SFS sets comedy with thesp Bates, helmer Penn. 
By Robert Hofler
Variety, 17 October 2001

THE NEW producing entity SFS will bring Alan Bates and Arthur Penn back to Broadway in the spring for a rare staging of the Turgenev comedy "Fortune's Fool," adapted by Michael Poulton.
Rehearsals will begin in January, with a 13-performance tryout at Connecticut's Stamford Center for thePerforming Arts prior to Gotham.
The producing team of Julian Schlosberg, Roy L. Furman and Ben Sprecher announced the creation of SFS (not to be confused with SFX, Clear Channel's old moniker) as well as a slate of future legit projects, including the Bates starrer with Penn attached as director.

Legit veterans

Bates last appeared on Broadway iin the 1972 production of "Butley." Penn helmed several Broadway offerings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, includingg "Two for the Seesaw," "Toys in the Attic" and "The Miracle Worker," which he brought to the screen.
Schlossberg said Penn also would direct the film version of "Fortune's Fool," with Bates again starring, this time as an old man who has lost his estate and fears for his future livelihood.
In addition to producing the Turgenev adaptation, SFS has secured the rights and/or commissioned new plays from A. R. Gurney, Kenneth Lonergan, Elaine May and Edna O'Brien. The produceers said these four works, as yet untitled, would be produced either on Broadway or Off Broadway.

Fortune's Fool, by Ivan Turgenev
(Kuzovkin), August, 1996, Chichester Festival Theatre,
and September, 1996, Theatre Royal, Bath
directed by Gale Edwards

Belated Release of a Hostage to Fortune
By Ismène Brown
Saturday 31 August 1996

Festival Theatre - Chichester. When a "comic masterpiece" by a great Russian writer takes 144 years to get to the British stage, your desire to cheer is slightly undermined by disquiet - why did it take 144 years?
Mike Poulton (who adapted Chichester's recent Uncle Vanya) is a Turgenev obsessive who last year was given a copy of a "lost" Turgenev comedy, Fortune's Fool (or The Parasite). For Chichester he has attempted to prune an unworkably long piece into a taut comic drama. So Urtext this is not.
The story is full of poignancy and mischief. To a neglected country mansion comes its inheritor, a newly married young woman, and her well-connected husband - something in the ministry. In the house lives a poor gentleman taken in as a "court jester" by the young woman's father 30 years earlier. Dependent, unoccupied, helpless, he waits to be evicted.
He seals his own fate by getting drunk and claiming that he is the new chatelaine's real father. Act 2 attempts to deal with the fall-out from this revelation. In the end, he accepts humiliation and a large cheque, and the young couple's marriage has been undermined.
Chichester has spared nothing in star-power - Alan Bates plays the central part, the poor Kuzovkin; his son Benedick plays the new master; and the magnificent Desmond Barrit - sweaty, flushed, piggy-eyed - is the neighbour who forces the confession into the open.
Gale Edwards's production, for all its pains, takes too straightforward a line, bypassing depths that explain and enrich the comic drama. Alan Bates gives us, persuasively, a good man wronged, without any hint of a possibility that he might be a liar - surely the suspense underpinning the bargains.
Benedick Bates, in the pivotal role of the politician, wavers between compassion and social outrage with the expressiveness of a Dalek, and his encounters with his wife (Rachel Pickup) are unconvincing.
The whole production seems undecided between satire and naturalism. The servants are a hammy lot, somewhere between "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" and "My Fair Lady," which blurs the network of exact social distinctions that makes Kuzovkin's plight so peculiarly painful, so peculiarly Russian.
A mordant play does periodically bite through. There are hilarious shafts at Russian society. Kuzovkin's recounting of the 26-year court case that impoverished him is a collector's item (virtuosically delivered by Alan Bates); Desmond Barrit, as a parvenu torturing the English (and French and Italian) languages, is probably funnier than Turgenev could have imagined.
##
from The Daily Telegraph, 7.ix.96

"Fortune's Fool" at the Chichester Festival Theatre, is an early play by Turgenev, written in 1848, when he was 30. ("A Month in the Country" was written six years later.) Until now it has been virtually unknown in this country, which turns out to have been very much our loss.
Olga Petrovna returns to the estate she has inherited with her young husband, a St Petersburg councillor. One of those waiting to greet her is Kuzovkin, who has lived on the estate for the past 30 years as a dependent and (to some extent) the resident clown. At dinner that night the more unpleasant of the guests ply him with drink and get him to tell the long, convoluted and absurd-sounding story of how he was cheated out of his own estate. Finally they goad him so cruelly that he blurts out his secret - he is Olga's father; and the rest of the play is taken up with the repercussions.
Gale Edwards's production gets off to a dreadful start. The homecoming scene is hopelessly mannered, with servants striking ludicrous poses and a major-domo who sounds as though he has stepped straight out of a British sitcom.
Then things start to improve, and though there are still some clumsy touches the excellence of the play itself wins through. The dinner-party is a superb set piece: in its final phase, with Kuzovkin bullied to distraction, it is almost unbearable. The reactions of the main characters the following day are fascinatingly ambiguous.
Alan Bates captures Kuzovkin's pathos but doesn't altogether convey his grotesque side: you feel he has kept too much of his dignity for there to be much drama in his attempts to win it back. Still, it is an excellent performance, full of sensitive detail. The triumph of the evening, however, is Desmond Barrit as the florid, evil-minded neighbour whose bullying precipitates the disaster. He is like one of those Dickensian monsters who are more frightening than funny - a fearsomely vivid presence, and quite unforgettable.