Review The Cherry Orchard

A modern-dress version of Russian classic The Cherry Orchard sparks thoughts on revolution for Peter Barker as part of a provocative season at the Arcola Theatre.

The Cherry Orchard
by Anton Chekhov

This Land Is Your Land
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Anton Chekhov’s final play The Cherry Orchard can be seen as an elegy for a lost world and for the British there may once have been a temptation to co-opt it into a post-imperial mindset. Or at least to look on the First World War as a watershed between the unpleasant now and the elegant past.

This 1977 adaptation of the play by playwright Trevor Griffiths, from a translation by Helen Rappaport, resolutely sets itself against a post-imperial reading; but it’s certainly post-something.

First produced at the Nottingham Playhouse, this is now the first time Griffiths’ adaptation has reached a London stage. However, this version did have an outing on television in 1981 in a technically groundbreaking BBC production.

Griffiths maintained he wanted his English version to revolutionize a play "seriously betrayed, almost consciously betrayed, over some 50 years  ...  The English still cling wilfully to the idea that the play is an elegy for the decline of civilization."

So now the Arcola Theatre's artistic director, Mehmet Ergen, who also directs, has positioned Chekhov's final play as the last in a season of plays looking at revolution -- Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths and the New Nigerians by Oladipo Agboluaje making up a trio.

Chekhov in 1904 is no revolutionary although, like many others at the time, he sensed change was coming in his Russia and an overthrow of the old order. But there is no act of violence dispossessing  the Ranevsky household of its renowned cherry orchard and other property. An off-stage property deal shunts them into the sidings.

A successful practitioner of a later revolution Mao Zedong, albeit responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, famously said: “革命不是一个请客吃饭  The revolution is not a dinner party.” But in Chekhov’s hands the social revolution does feel like a dinner party with a covert seismic shift, emphasized in this modern dress production.

The cherry orchard is part of Madame Ranevsky's debt-ridden estate. on the verge of being auctioned off when, further stripped of her wealth by a treacherous lover, she's rescued from Paris.

We follow her emotional and economic journey and  Sian Thomas's Madame Ranevsky, as she slides from the imperious to the disorientated, still manages to keep our sympathy for this deeply flawed character.

Indeed, her powerful  verbal disembowelment of the eternal student Trofimov (an eloquent and convincing Abhin Galeya) makes her grow in stature in our eyes, without ever becoming a frightening monster.  

The household of decay also includes Jack Klaff’s charmingly eccentric but feckless Gayev, her brother, who is even less capable of leading a responsible life than Madame Ranevsky.

Set against the old order is the upwardly mobile entrepreneur Lophakin, Jude Akuwudike, the son of a freed serf who inevitably brings down his old patron as he climbs up.

He dances in joy tinged with bewilderment as fortunes change in his favour. His vision of the cherry orchard hanging with bodies of the dead from the past has a gruesome reality in hindsight, although in 1904 it is not yet revolution, just a changing of the guard. 

Along with the eternal student, there is the eternal serf Firs, who views his class's emancipation as a disaster, captured in Robin Hooper’s doddering performance with his eye set on a past which is more certain because it is history.

Jade Williams gives a restrained but suitably self-denying performance as Varya, Ranevsky's adopted daughter. Equally, Simon Scardifield does a comic turn with glorious timing as the clumsy clerk Yepikhodov. But all are scooped up in unwelcome change.

Yet others look like emerging intact. Jim Bywaters' wonderfully gritty and humorous landowning neighbour Pischick still looks like a winner. And we can guess that Lily Wood’s sexy and thoroughly convincing ingénue Dunyasha will also be on the rise, perhaps alongside Ryan Wichert’s confident manservant Yasha.

Iona McLeish’s spare white set dominated by an unfeasibly tall bookcase is highly adaptable, aided by David Howe's lighting and sound by Neil McKeown, which draw us into the world of ghosts and dreams that is the cherry orchard.

But it is to the future, pregnant with danger and uncertainty, that Ergen would like to direct us. If at one point, Pischick does say, “Something will happen, you see; if not today, then tomorrow.”, it feels like an inclusive moment for all of us.

Change is afoot. Chekhov never saw later revolutions, when a class of people overthrew another by an act of violence. We are now post-imperial, post-Cold War, post-Brexit, post-Trump election and  this thought-provoking  amber/green light production  may well point us towards a post-dinner party world.

Review Three Sisters

Three Sisters 
by Anton Chekhov
In A New Version by Tracy Letts

Home And Away
http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

The world in this spare adaptation of Chekhov's penultimate play, kept by playwright Tracy Letts in an early twentieth century milieu, turns in jerks and starts like the beat in The Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go which marks the final note of this production.

The three sisters, brought up in Moscow, come from an army family, their late father a general sent to a provincial garrison town.

Schoolteacher Olga (Celine Abrahams) and Masha (Ivy Corbin), who married young but has grown to despise her husband (Steven Rodgers), chafe against their rural life. The youngest, romantic Irina (Molly Crookes) works at the telegraph office. Her nostalgia for Moscow is the most intense, like her sisters feeling herself a cut above her local neighbours, longing to and believing she will return to the bright lights of the populous city.

The military stationed in their town, with a round of social events, provides the sisters' chief distraction, albeit, as happeed once to their own family, they can be moved on at any time. However, the sisters also pin their hopes on the sole son of the family, their violin-playing brother Andrey (Benjamin Chandler), whom they believe has the wherewithal to become a professor.

Masha has become romantically attached to commanding officer Vershinin (Ashley Russell), trapped in an unhappy marriage. Officers, gentle piano-playing Tusenbach (Ian Malmed) and aggressive Solyony (Hugo Nicholson), pursue flighty Irina.

They barely register at first how their brother has rooted himself in the town, becoming entangled with local girl, the ill-educated but ambitious Natasha (Francesca Burgoyne).

 With the title shortened to the more casual, less portentous Three Sisters (originally The Three Sisters), this play aims to cross the time divide by shorning the piece of most of its specifically Russian social and literary references.

This has both positives and negatives. The production at the Union Theatre, directed by Phil Willmott, has a cinematic quality - voices drift from rooms off the in-the-round stage, actions halt in meaningful glances and pauses.

Small but effective moments, verbal and non verbal, are scattered across the play like sharp visceral pin pricks. Irina's superior grimace, for example, when exiting the room containing the socially awkward Natasha, little knowing the relationsip with Andrey.

Nevertheless, there are drawbacks. There is an unevenness in tone in the denuded script with its many pauses. Its spareness feels at the expense of the relationship between the three sisters, along with the plot and a flattening of the drama's natural ebb and flow.

Natasha's role with the most strident lines as she gains in power becomes magnified, the self-reproach of the elderly doctor Chebutykin (despite a relaxed and engaging performance by JP Turner) is diminished, the turning point fire loses dramatic urgency the relationship between characters viewed from the outside rather than felt from the inside.

At the same time, there's no doubting the visual and verbal appeal of the strong cast, along with lucid design - costumes by Penn O'Gara and a soundscape by Sebastian Atterbury. The production slips purposefully from the brightly lit family drawing room to a simple bench in twilight gloom with hints of a railway station caught in time.

Letts is probably best known otherwise for his tale of family torment, Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then film, August: Osage County. Moments of zest and delicacy have impact in Three Sisters, but finally this adaptation of the play seems just too subtle and filmic and it's an amber light for an interesting if somewhat impaired version of the Chekhov classic.
   

Review Young Chekhov Platonov/Ivanov/The Seagull

Young Chekhov

Platonov/Ivanov/The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

in new versions by David Hare

Chekhov Cluedo

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

Yes, it was Anton in the drawing room with the revolver. But what led up up to the fatal shot? There is a danger seeing three early plays by the young Anton Chekhov (or in this case Chekhov as adapted by David Hare) in one day that it does become a kind of Cluedo common denominator search.

Well-educated but disillusioned young(ish) men, landowners whose mortgages are being called in, dodgy doctors, scoundrel schoolteachers, easily influenced young females, worldly wise older ones ...  Will the National Theatre's retailing arm soon be selling a "Construct Your Own Chekhov Play In A Day" kit? ;)

To be fair, it seems to TLT and her little troika, that a hint of the boxed set approach, alongside broadcasting of the plays, is probably inevitable in this day and age.

This trilogy, directed by Jonathan Kent, starts in the 19th century and ends with an updating, costume wise, of The Seagull to 1930s Russia. With the set designed by Tom Pye, a Russian estate complete with woods and water seeping onto the stage, there is the implied sense of a saga based not on one family, unless that family is the family of actors, but centred on one property. 

Platonov was never staged during Chekhov's lifetime with more than five hours' of play discovered in archives many years after his death.  Although untitled, it usually takes its name from the central character of the schoolteacher, bitter cynic Platonov who nevertheless proves an object of desire for the women around him. 

These are his wife Sasha (Jade Williams) with whom he has fathered a child, the forceful landowning general's widow, Anna (Nina Sosanya) her daughter in law Sofya (Olivia Vinall)  and the blue stocking Maria (Sarah Twomey) both repelled and attracted by him. Written by a 20 year old Chekhov for an actress who rejected the script, it remains, although cut down to two hours and 40 minutes, a baggy monster of a play. 

In Hare's version there is a vitality but also a sense that maybe it is a piece rooted in another literary form. There are a plethora of short stories contained within its flexible frame. 

Familiar Chekovian themes of debt and disillusion mix with broad melodrama, including a bandit (Des McAleer) prepared to do the violent bidding of a moneylender (David Verrey),  alongside farce. Farce, despite that tragic ending when Anton leaves the loaded revolver in the dining room. 

It's certainly a tour de force for  James McArdle as the eponymous schoolmaster, who casts himself part as Don Juan and part as Hamlet,  swirled between these women. 

There is a repertory company for all three plays with some of the actors cast in two (Peter Egan, Joshua James, David Verrey, Jade Williams, Nina Sosanya, Jonathan Coy, Pip Carter, Brian Pettifer, James McArdle, Des McAleer, Sarah Twomey Mark Penfold, Beverley Klein, Col Farrell, Geoffrey Streatfeild. Debra Gillett) or three roles (Mark Donald, Olivia Vinall, Luke Pierre) across the entire Young Chekhov opus. 

Yet in some ways Ivanov felt the most successful of the three plays for your own spritely duo. Firmly hooked in the melodramatic tradition, Ivanov is about a thwarted reformist landowner (Geoffrey Streatfeild), up to his ears in debt while obligated by his pre-announced ideals to pay his workers as well as his lenders in full.

He is obstinately set on a economically doomed course of action, railing against his dying Jewish wife (Nina Sosanya) while he knows her own lack of blame and power over the situation. Interestingly, the Young Chekhov programme notes the playwright claimed to have been engaged for a brief time to a young Jewish woman (later, unknown of course to Chekhov who died in 1904, to be arrested in her eighties in Vichy France and gassed in Treblinka). 

Before one dismisses the Ivanov story as a mere melodramatic trope, TLT can verify a similar situation in an American branch of her family - although without that familiar revolver turning up in the drawing room. 

The third play is also the most familiar - The Seagull. Olivia Vinall completes an impressive trio of roles, this time as the betrayed young Nina. 

With costumes updated to, presumably, 20th century Communist Russia, an actress mother  Irina Arkadina (Anna Chancellor) of aspiring playwright Konstantin (Joshua James) returns to her estate with celebrated writer Trigorin (Geoffrey Streatfield again). 

Naive Nina, initiated into the world of theatre in more ways than one,  pulls away from besotted Konstantin after his mother introduces her to Trigorin. 

This third play felt much more like a screen interpretation - indeed there is a visual hint that the tragic fate of Konstantin, even after some success in the literary world, is linked with the movies. Surprisingly nevertheless Irina Arkadina and Trigorin felt too sincere about their art for us in this version.  

As we have noted before, Nina's last appearance can equally encompass revenge for being lured into life as an actress and spurned lover as well as a genuinely unhinged aspect to her behaviour. This dual resonance was something we felt was lost in this adaptation. 

At the same time, Young Chekhov gave us generous dose of the playwright and the intertwined trio of plays added one more character: the Creative Tension between playwright, actors, directorial interpretation and, even if it is a big word, life.   

Above all, seeing these three productions together in one day brought home to TLT and her motorised theatre-going comrade the complex humanity which lies behind Anton in the drawing room with his characters and a loaded revolver.  An amber/green light.

Review The Seagull

The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

The Rivals

https://openairtheatre.com/production/the-seagull

The Seagull! Squawk! In a new version by writer Torben Betts directed by Matthew Dunster! Squawk! At Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre! OK, enough of these seagull noises!

Of course, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre made its name with the once annual play-within-a-comedy by the English bard, “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”. Here we have a Russian classic, Anton Chekhov’s human comedy and viewed as the first of his theatrical masterpieces. 

And it seems like a dream location, outdoors: water (a man-made stage lake), trees, sky.

The Regent's Park stage is reflected by a huge angled mirror suspended from the heavens for a play with a bitter yet loving satiric edge, It’s a clever touch by designer Jon Bausor in this most self-reflexive of plays about life, theatre and art, where all the characters also reflect each other in one way or another. And all just as relevant in our virtual age!  As the characters stroll on stage, the mirror, hanging like Nature's camera, gives a bird’s eye reverse view, yet frames the figures like the French and Russian paintings of the time.

TLT and her horseless scarlet troika have only ever read The Seagull and were keen to experience this early Chekhov classic tableaux 1895 play of unrequited love, disappointment, life, theatre  – oh, yes and comedy :).

 

Writer Torben Betts who adapted this version made quite a splash with crowd-pleasing Invincible. But Chekhov is pretty funny too in his poignant and, in TLT’s view, subtly political sort of way. If fans of Invincible come to this, they may be surprised to learn that most of the best jokes come from Chekhov. 

Irina Arkadina (a finely drawn and gracefully humorous performance by Janie Dee) returns with her lover Boris Trigorin (Alex Robertson), a successful novelist, to the family estate, home of her bachelor brother retired state councillor and lawyer, Peter Sorin (a suitably curmodgeonly Ian Redford). 

Also living on the estate are Irina’s fretful student drop-out and would-be avant-garde playwright son Constantin (Matthew Tennyson) alongside the farm manager Ilia (Fraser James), his wife Paulina (Lisa Palfrey), their disenchanted goth-like daughter Masha (Lisa Diveney). Wandering in are idealistic young Nina (Poldark’s Sabrina Bartlett), living on a neighbouring estate with her landowner father and stepmother, the old lothario of a doctor, Eugene Dorn (a relaxed and engaging performance from Danny Webb) and impecunious schoolmaster Simon Medviedenko (Colin Hoult). 

Like a seagull, the play is a delicate but tough old bird winging its way through stage conventions, symbolism, images, impressions, politics, history, the constant merging yet separation of  life and theatre.  Still, a play is a play and birds don’t normally get reviews ... ;)

While much critical writing dwells on Constantin as artist, his passion for Nina, and the mother-son relationship, perhaps the play is just as much about the rivalry between two actresses.

  

The women are the centre of attention (much to Constantin’s chagrin) but their positions are always fragile.  For example, in spite of her selfishness and self absorbtion, why should we doubt Irina’s assertion that her costumes use up much of her cash?  Nina, infatuated with Boris but also playing her hand against Irina, makes the decision to go to Moscow and take to the stage when she learns the actress and her lover are leaving.

Boris does leave Irina for Nina but finally abandons the young actress and his child to go back to Irina. In the end, Irina is seemingly successful,  Nina  made to drudge from one small town to another with the implication of possible prostitution to make ends meet. Yet both have lost the fathers of their children and, in a final (off stage) coup de théâtre, their children.

In fact, if it one wants to veer towards theatrical artificiality and a detective story, it’s almost as though other characters deliberately lure Nina to her fate of repertory company drudgery:  Irina herself, her brother the lawyer, the doctor all lavish Nina's acting with praise. Boris, indulged by Irina, seduces Nina, then returns to Irina and uses  the young actress’s life, made into tragedy, for his own purposes.    

Part of the unblinking toughness and poignancy of the play is the attraction and resistance to theatrical symbolism, the guying of melodrama, yet the conceding of the truth melodrama reveals. All back-to-back with hard-nosed money matters.

Seeing this production in final preview, TLT and her cabriolet were taken with the ingenious design, especially the play-within-a-play and the soundscape using recorded voice overs giving a satisfyingly visceral resonance. 

But the mash-up and experimenting with styles felt less successful. 

Nina’s pivotal final tussle against identification with the main symbol of the play, to retain her sanity, her dignity, to face reality and continue, did not come through for us. The production therefore lost its rhythm plus some of the play’s clear sightedness about human relations set within the context of a fast diminishing Russian Empire hierarchy. 

In our opinion, it felt sometimes too muddled to turn the audience into fellow travellers, enthused enough to sway at different times in favour of one character or another or to follow the story’s delicately incremental, viciously funny yet tragic development. 

Perhaps the open air location, particularly with some deliberately jarring sound effects, and large stage didn’t lend itself to the style of production. Nor is it surprising to read that director Matthew Dunster comes from the Young Vic and maybe it all would have worked better in that space. Still, an amber light for a stronger first act, ingenious design, some stand out performances and of course a spectacular park setting.

PS  What is it about seagulls? It did occur to TLT that a near contemporary of Chekhov, German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a famous cryptic poem about seagulls  Do these writer chaps know something about gulls that we don't?;)