From Russia with love, remorse and riotous laughter
SIGNING up on a summer’s day for eight hours of 19thcentury Russian drama might make you flinch. But when three theatre giants and a brilliant cast create a world so joyfully funny, vigorous and ruefully familiar, it’s a delight. You can book separately for this triple-bill of Chekhov plays, adapted by David Hare and directed by Jonathan Kent, but at weekends there is a chance for immersion — well worth it.
For these are very early plays. PLATONOV is a rumbustious chronicle of an educated, thwarted widow and a Byronically handsome man who creates havoc in a family and within himself — James McArdle is more than irresistible enough to convince in this role.
At 20, Chekhov never trimmed it down from six hours or saw it performed, but Hare’s version is tight, wickedly witty, emotionally honest and rife with snortingly funny oneliners, not least from the irresistible Nina Sosanya as Anna.
IVANOV was the young Chekhov’s first produced play, more tightly focused on the central character. Geoffrey Streatfeild is depressive, disappointed, remorseful and broke, out of love with his dying Jewish wife and beguiled by the lovely Sasha, his creditor’s daughter.
Olivia Vinall (who is in all three plays) is luminous, blondely angelic and gloriously tempting, but here firmly bossy — a onewoman ‘ambulance corps’ for hopeless Ivanov (‘My job in life is to understand him!’). Her family elders, in a memorable upmarket party scene, are variously awful and hilarious. But Chekhov always allows gleams of redemptive humanity: Jonathan Coy is superb as the put-upon father, begging the pair of them just to live a normal flawed life and get on with it.
Darkness rears up in one horrifying three-word shout which makes the audience gasp. Then room and wife sink through the floor as if in despair and Ivanov reels off, wrecked, into the trees, reeds and water of the beautiful set which serves all three plays.
The last is best known, but still vibrates with youthful melodrama and fury. THE SEAGULL is the tale of geeky struggling author Konstantin (an intensely felt performance by Joshua James), his love for innocent Nina (Vinall, shining again) and his diva mother, a bravura Anna Chancellor with a pretentious, weak, famous lover, Trigorin (Streatfeild again). The moment when he stares helplessly over her shrieking head, mutely appealing to the audience, met gales of laughter.
All three plays have fireworks, real and emotional; all end in a single pistol-shot.
All three show us Chekhov not as we know him from plays such as The Cherry Orchard — as a gentle dispassionate observer — but as a fierce youth. He was starting on his lifetime themes of frustration, debt, passion, escape, city versus country values, human absurdity magnified by vodka, and suicide. The writer behind these early plays is young, not afraid to mix hilarity and satire with deep shafts of complicated feeling.
The final curtain call on the three-play day brings everyone on: McArdle (I am happy to say) back in his long underpants as the battered Byron of the first play, not as the sober prim doctor he plays in the second. We cheered them all to the echo.
If you’ve time for only one, Platonov is funniest and The Seagull the most wrenching. But all three are wonderful.