CHEKHOV WOULD HAVE LOVED THIS!
Friel’s well-crafted homage leaves us guessing, which is EXACTLY why…
‘This epilogue, in less skilful hands, could have been ridiculous or crass…’
‘Interesting that the audience laughed at incidents that weren’t specifically funny’
Afterplay Bewley’sCafeTheatre ★★★★★ Until Dec 23
Brian Friel’s 60minute play, first performed 20 years ago, is a cleverly crafted homage to Chekhov, the master of Russian misery, unhappy families and unrequited love. It takes a look at the future possibilities for two of the characters in Chekhov’s plays, Sonya in Uncle Vanya, and Andrey in Three Sisters.
This epilogue, in less skilful hands, could have been ridiculous or crass, but Friel had such a rapport with Chekhov’s style and sensibility that the play is a genuinely moving account of two individuals, now older but still living with family grief and unrealistic dreams of future fulfilment. The audience doesn’t have to know the original plays, since Sonya and Andrey cover their separate lives in their conversation.
They meet 20-odd years after the original plays are set, in a cafe in Moscow. They have already encountered each other by accident and they continue with some light banter: Andrey, a failed academic, giving a chirpy account of his talented family and his work as a violinist at the opera, while Sonya goes into detail about her past and her duties tending to the decaying estate she inherited.
Her sensitivity towards the trees, their spiritual significance and the beauty of nature could make her a poster girl for the environment.
But bit by bit the unpleasant truth about their stories emerges in painful detail, especially about Andrey’s apparent success story. Though I found myself asking whatever happened World War One and the revolution?
Karen Ardiff’s apparently selfassured Sonya is also desperately clinging to the unlikely hope of a happier future, driven by fortitude, an unfulfilled love and a taste for vodka.
Andrey, as played by Barry Barnes, has a cheerful exterior that gradually crumbles as reality replaces make-believe and he attempts to make the running for a possible new relationship, but leaves us guessing, just as Chekhov would want it.
One of the interesting things about the production is the way the audience often laughed at incidents that weren’t specifically funny. Chekhov would have loved that.
He always insisted that his plays were comedies, although they were steeped in gloom, misfortune and approaching disasters. He was possibly smiling at all those forlorn aristocrats miserably looking at their disintegrating world, unable or unwilling to do anything about it. And the plays were first produced when the Bolsheviks were already gearing up.