{"id":1197,"date":"2016-08-04T17:34:18","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T17:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1197"},"modified":"2016-08-04T17:34:21","modified_gmt":"2016-08-04T17:34:21","slug":"young-chekhovathon-for-chekhovaphiles-of-all-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2016\/08\/young-chekhovathon-for-chekhovaphiles-of-all-ages.html","title":{"rendered":"Young Chekhovathon for Chekhovaphiles (of all ages)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"PLATONOV<\/a>

James McArdle as Platonov and Nina Sosanya as Anna Petrovna in PLATONOV by \u00a0Anton Chekhov. Director – Jonathan Kent, Designer – Tom Pye, Lighting – Mark Henderson, Music – Jonathan Dove, Sound – Paul Groothuis, The National Theatre, London, UK, 2016, Credit – Johan Persson – www.perssonphotography.com \/<\/p><\/div>\n

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Young Chekhov<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A bit of a sucker for aesthetic marathons, there\u2019s nothing I like better than taking a whole week out of one\u2019s life to hear and see Wagner\u2019s Ring<\/em>; Philip Glass\u2019s Einstein on the Beach<\/em> had me avid for tickets; a painter\u2019s late-career retrospective is usually my kind of show; \u00a0and from the sublimity of Proust, and at least some of the 12 volumes of Anthony Powell\u2019s Dance to the Music of Time<\/em>, to the ever lubricious, sometimes silly, ten volumes of Simon Raven\u2019s Alms for Oblivion<\/em>, if it\u2019s a continuing saga, I\u2019ll read it. An all-day Chekhov-fest sounds just my thing, and so it was. At the National Theatre\u2019s huge thrust-stage Olivier auditorium we saw the transfer of the Chichester Festival production, under the collective rubric \u201cYoung Chekhov,\u201d of the first three plays: Platonov, Ivanov <\/em>and The Seagull. <\/em>\u00a0David Hare\u2019s versions of all three might just come to be seen as the British playwright\u2019s best work \u2013 his treatment of Platonov<\/em> certainly makes the most of this otherwise baggy, difficult play, and shows it as the masterpiece it is.<\/p>\n

This is the first time I\u2019ve seen the whole of Platonov<\/em>, as the premi\u00e8re of this version was at the Almeida Theatre at King\u2019s Cross on September 11th<\/sup>, 2001; and I was among what Hare calls the \u201cunderstandably distracted\u201d audience. Having heard the first news of the Twin Towers before leaving home, I found myself too jittery to remain in the theatre after the interval. Hare says he\u2019s tweaked the text since, and the present production is superb.<\/p>\n

The entire trilogy is directed by Jonathan Kent. With spectacularly successful, flexible and varying sets by Tom Pye, often exciting lighting by Mark Henderson, and music by the top-flight composer, Jonathan Dove, it is no punishment to sit through three plays in a single day. Kent\u2019s direction is almost cinematic \u2013 you realise this when the characters deliver a large proportion of their lines facing away from the audience, in the more natural, flowing way dialogue is spoken in the movies. There are exceptions: the soliloquies in each of the plays, and some are delivered in the more theatrical manner, to the audience. Part of the stunning realisation of the three dramas owes its effect to this apparently easy, but in reality very difficult rendering of dialogue as conversation, with its changing postures and more natural-seeming body language. However, there is the risk, when a character turns his back on the audience, that the audience will not be able to hear the actor\u2019s lines. Despite sound designer Paul Groothuis\u2019s best efforts, at this first performance we were deprived of the hearing of a good many lines. This could, of course, be the consequence of our seats, at the extreme left of Row K in the stalls \u2013 I checked with my immediate neighbours, and they reported the same difficulties \u2013 so perhaps it was not a problem in the rest of the auditorium.<\/p>\n

That niggle apart, this was a great theatrical occasion, with memorable playing across all three works. Platonov<\/em> was a failure when it was written, six0-hours-worth of maundering by a still-young schoolmaster who has, says Hare, \u201csquandered his inherited fortune,\u201d and who invokes Hamlet<\/em> to characterise his own inability to commit himself to any of the four women to whom he is irresistible (despite his reluctance to wash or shave). As a seducer he\u2019s a tease, a practitioner of amor interruptus<\/em> \u2013 the only woman he\u2019s certainly slept with is his god-bothering, daily church-going, wife, Sasha Ivanovna, as they have an infant son; but probably also Sofya Yogorovna, the impressionable, beautiful wife of the weak Sergei Voynitzev. \u00a0As Platonov says to his wife, embracing her, \u201cI know I\u2019ve done wrong, I\u2019m Sofya\u2019s lover, possibly Anna\u2019s lover, too \u2013 that isn\u2019t quite clear yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pye\u2019s generous, water-punctuated sets convey the blazing heat of the June 1881 day on an estate in provincial southern Russia; and the dialogue of the first six or seven scenes show us a group of bourgeois characters differently conscious of the social change that is in the air.<\/p>\n

James McArdle is magnificent as Platonov, amiably spiky and gracefully awkward, an embodiment of charming contradictions that mean trouble for anyone who falls for him. even Anna Petrovna, \u201cone of the great heroines of the Russian stage,\u201d Hare writes, \u201c\u2013 an educated, intelligent and loving woman who can find no place in the world for her love, her intelligence or her education.\u201d She is played by Nina Sosanya with sexy suppleness to the very tips of her fingers, as she gestures, and lights the first of the many cigarettes smoked during the first act (symmetrically balanced by the shots of vodka consumed in the third). There\u2019s fine acting by Olivia Vinall as Sofya (and stamina \u2013 she has a major part in all three plays), by Des McAleer (another three-parter) as the murderous horse thief, Osip, and by Joshua James as the doctor in Platonov<\/em>. (There\u2019s a doctor in each of the three plays.)<\/p>\n

Nikolai Ivanov, a regional councillor, is the complement of Mikhail Vasilievich Platonov and Geoffrey Streatfield plays him as lithe and sinuous to McArdle\u2019s angularity. In a bit of brilliant casting, in Ivanov<\/em> McArdle is the (now clean-shaven) doctor, Lvov, worrying himself sick about the health of Ivanov\u2019s wife, the converted Jew, n\u00e9e Sarah Abramson, who now calls herself by the same name as the heroine of Platonov<\/em>, Anna Petrovna, and is also played by the elegant Nina Sosanya. Though tubercular and delicate, she has a spine of steel, and does not crumple as much as the audience does when the husband, for whom she has sacrificed family and fortune, calls her a \u201cdirty Jew.\u201d Just as there\u2019s an autobiographical element in each of the three doctors in the troika of plays, and though Ivanov <\/em>takes on Russian anti-Semitism head-on, Chekhov had a Jewish girlfriend, whom he once referred to horridly as \u201cEfros the Nose.\u201d Hare maintains that this simply shows that the playwright was as complicated as his creations: Chekhov\u2019s plays do away with the stereotyped stock characters of melodrama, but in life he was not above launching a stereotyped insult.<\/p>\n

Still, seeing this trio of plays performed together does enhance your respect for Chekhov as one of the greatest of writers, one who, as James Wood insists, should be bracketed with Shakespeare, for the reason that the Russian also never simplifies, or allows a character to be a spokesman for a view or the representative of a trait or humour. Both playwrights respect the individuality of their creations, which is how they teach us something about being human \u2013 to be is to be particular, not universal. (Or, as my old teacher, W.V.O. Quine put it, \u201cTo be is to be the value of a bound variable.\u201d I\u2019ve always wanted to find an excuse to quote this.)<\/p>\n

Whereas Platonov finds Hamlet ridiculous, Ivanov despises himself, saying \u201cI\u2019ve been playing Hamlet.\u201d Where Platonov knows he is irresistible, Ivanov says \u201cI am contagion\u2026 How can you love me? No one can love me.\u201d Where Platonov swaggers (if sordidly in his underwear), Ivanov says \u201cI am dying of shame.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the deal in The Seagull<\/em>, then? Is the 43-year-old actress Arkadina (supremely played by Anna Chancellor) really past it? Is she as horrid a mother as her son, Konstantin (a willowy but unbending Joshua James) feels she is? Is there really some conflict between the old aesthetic represented by (the too-conscious of his little celebrity) Trigorin (Geoffrey Streatfield) and the (at first, slightly batty) new literature of Kostya? Wonderfully cold and disagreeable, Trigorin has an affair with the star-struck Nina (another fine performance by Olivia Vinall) just because he can \u2013 and just as Kostya has shot the seagull \u2013 only because he can, and for no other reason or motive.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not giving much away to say that all three plays end with a bang. Or, would do, if Hare did not follow several others and retain the whimpering last line explaining it in The Seagull<\/em>, delivered by the anodyne Dr Dorn. It doesn\u2019t seem to me to fit the speech rhythms and patterns of the rest of the play, and very definitely does not provide a cadence. All the versions on my bookshelf concur with Hare\u2019s, but in a piece written that year, Mark Lawson says Anya Reiss seems to have solved the problem in her 2012 adaptation.<\/p>\n

So kudos all around, with the tiny quibble about sound. Platonov<\/em>, the weak link in Chekhov\u2019s works, is rescued and redeemed by the production (for me, it even had a slight edge over Ivanov<\/em>); the casts of all three are superlative; Sir David Hare has done his best work yet; and, though this is a transfer, the National Theatre is once again showing us that it appreciates its own purpose.<\/p>\n

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    Young Chekhov A bit of a sucker for aesthetic marathons, there\u2019s nothing I like better than taking a whole week out of one\u2019s life to hear and see Wagner\u2019s Ring; Philip Glass\u2019s Einstein on the Beach had me avid for tickets; a painter\u2019s late-career retrospective is usually my kind of show; \u00a0and from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-jj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1197"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1199,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions\/1199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}