TIL SEPT 9 HiRes

18
YOUNG CHEKHOV: PLATONOV,
IVANOV AND THE SEAGULL
Olivier Theatre
It’s interesting to note that Chekhov, like
Turgenev, Ibsen and Strindberg, matured
into greatness in mid-career or towards the
end of their lives. Yet, with the exception of
Eugene O’Neill, all the greatest American
and British 20th century dramatists (Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter,
Edward Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, Tom
Stoppard), made their reputations while
relatively young men.
Young Chekhov, a trilogy which
includes two of Chekhov’s earliest plays,
offers a riveting insight into the maturing
process of a playwright whose greatness
is second only to Shakespeare. Yet,
when, at the age of 20 he wrote a first
draft of Platonov, no one was interested
in staging it and the play remained
unproduced in his lifetime.
Watching it today in a trenchant
version by David Hare which had the
misfortune of opening at the Almeida
Theatre on the night of the 9/11 attacks
in New York, and which, together with
Hare’s adaptation of Ivanov, Chekov’s
first completed (and staged) play, it will
surely be more regularly performed.
Not that Platonov and Ivanov are
masterpieces. But as they so
triumphantly proved at last year’s
Chichester Festival, the seeds of future
greatness are very much in evidence.
Both plays have familiar bourgeoisie
settings, there are the equally familiar
references to the boredom of country
life, relentless heat is a factor, the
eponymous leading men exhibit Hamletlike
qualities (no accident as Hamlet is
referenced on more than one occasion),
both men are unwilling or unable to
requite the love of the women in their
lives, both the estates on which the
plays are set are in financial jeopardy,
both feature medical doctors and both
plays (as does The Seagull) end in death
by gunshot.
They also have in common what the
critic Kenneth Tynan memorably referred
to as ‘dynamic apathy’.
Despite the melodrama and the
miasma of doom that turns many of the
characters into life’s victims, they
possess a fair amount of humour,
justifying Chekhov’s own description of
his plays as comedies. Indeed, there are
scenes in both these early plays that
border on farce.
For me, though, the real discovery of
Jonathan Kent’s exemplary staging of the
trilogy, is Platonov the play and
Platonov the character. As interpreted so
beguilingly by James McArdle in a
Scottish accent, he’s a mundane, vodkaimbibing
schoolmaster by profession
but with a brogadoccio swagger women
find irresistible. Though married, he is
having affairs with a general’s widow
and a recently married ex-flame. No
wonder his brother-in-law calls him
‘misogyny on wheels’.
A scene from The Seagull.
Photo: Johan Persson.
Ivanov, on the other hand, has all of
Platonov’s flaws, but without his charm
or charisma. As played, quite
harrowingly, by Geoffrey Streatfeild he’s
clearly a man in deep crisis. He’s
clinically depressed, deeply in debt and
has no love for his ailing wife Anna
(Nina Sosanya, excellent), whom he
shockingly condemns as a ‘a dirty Jew’.
The only person he despises more, is
himself. Yet for all that he is pursued by
lovestruck Sasha (Olivia Vinali).
He’s the centre-piece of a social set
Chekhov lacerates with a gaggle of
female friends and neighbours whom
Kent allows to overact to the point of
caricature in order, do doubt, to
underline just how anti-Semitic, empty
and shallow they are. The men fare
better with James McArdle
unrecognisable with slicked-bck hair
and a shaven face, as the sanctimonious
Dr. Lvov who diagnoses Anna’s
tuberculosis.
In 1896, nine years after Ivanov,
The Seagull was disastrously premiered
in St. Petersburg. In 1898 it was
famously revived by Stanislavski and
the Moscow Art Theatre immediately
establishing itself as the most important
play of its time.
Unlike the two earlier plays, it’s an
ensemble piece with four central
character in which Chekhov seamlessly
extends the parameters of theatre by
writing a key scene featuring an avant
garde play within the play.
Konstantin (Joshua James) is an
aspiring symbolist playwright intent on
establishing new forms. His mother,
Arkadina (Anna Chacellor) is a selfabsorbed
actress who has no time for
her son’s literary pretentions and refuses
to take his writing seriously. She’s in
love with Trigorin (Geoffrey Streatfeild),
a worldly, highly successful middlebrow
author whose work Konstantin
despises. The fourth character is Nina
(Olivia Vinali) a would-be actress, whom
Konstantin loves, but who is tragically in
thrall to Trigorin.
In Kent’s luminous staging and Hare’s
vibrant adaptation, all four of the central
characters give superb performances,
with Olivia Vinali’s Nina especially
affecting.
Designer Tom Pye’s sets, the exteriors
of which are dominated by birch trees
and a lake through which Nina, spritelike,
makes all her entrances and exits,
is economical but effective. In Platonov
he even conjures up a train that hurtles
towards the audience.
As was the case in Chichester you
can see all three plays on certain days,
or, if you find that prospect daunting
(and you really shouldn’t), you can see
them separately.
Either way this is a magnificent
theatrical experience.
CLIVE HIRSCHHORN
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