IVANOV at the Olivier Theatre, National Theatre - Earlier Early Chekhov

After enjoying Jonathan Kent's production of THE SEAGULL I wanted to see how he approached Chekhov's earlier drama IVANOV. especially as he was using the David Hare translation that was the basis of his starry production at the Almeida nearly 20 years ago where Ralph Fiennes was an impassioned anti-hero.

Geoffrey Streatfeild, who had been a very urbane Trigorin in THE SEAGULL, here played the tormented lead character, a hard part to play as nothing makes him happy - and by extension, potentially the audience too.  Since Ralph Fiennes I have also seen Kenneth Branagh play the role, well... half of it.

It was in 2008, in the balcony of the Wyndhams Theatre, during Michael Grandage's production when I started to feel strange... was I going to faint, be sick, both?  More importantly, was I going to do it sitting dead centre in a long row?  I could not have negotiated my way along the narrow leg room in the dark, half way through the first act.  So I sat it out, staring at the chandelier which was on eye-level, daring not to look down at the stage in case I toppled forward with the vertigo I was experiencing.  God it seemed to last forever, all the time enduring Branagh's whiny performance.  The interval came and I left...

Ivanov is on the edge of the financial abyss; his acres of farmland are failing thanks to the progressive methods he championed when younger - a fact that his unctuous land manager never fails to mention - and his creditors are getting louder.  More troubling, he has fallen out of love with his Jewish wife Anna who is also succumbing to consumption.  Ivanov had expected to inherit her family's fortune but her father disinherited her when she not only married a gentile but also changed her name.  The town's thinly-veiled anti-Semitism is beginning to infect Ivanov too.  Anna's strait-laced young doctor Lvov hates Ivanov for his negligence and also delights in telling him.

There is one last chance for financial escape; Sasha, the daughter of his sympathetic friend Pavel Lebedev and his hard-hearted but wealthy wife Zinaida.  Every night Ivanov goes to their house to be belittled and patronized by their boorish friends but also is succeeding in wearing Zinaida down.  Sasha is bored living with her parents and is eager to be married to Ivanov but what of Anna?

Oddly I remember Kent's Almeida production as more light-hearted despite the moments of anguish for Ivanov and Anna but here the sombre tone is more prevalent.  The overall gloom is signalled by Streatfeild's Ivanov, rarely varying the pitch of his performance even when romancing Olivia Vinall's Sasha.  For once I liked Vinall's performance, her usual overly-declamatory style matched the character's nervy desperation to be married to her beloved older man.

Kent certainly showed the division between the two households: the depressive air at Ivanov's house and the boorish clamour of the Lebedev parties - at the former Des McAleer was delightfully awful as the overseer Borkin, James McArdle impressed as Doctor Lvov, whose high-minded self-righteousness takes no prisoners, and Nina Sosanya was a gentle Anna Petrovna, blazing into an anger that consumes her.

The excruciating Lebedev household featured fine performances from Brian Pettifer as the dull gambler Kosykh, Beverley Klein as the ghastly widow Avdotya, Debra Gillet's steel-hearted Zinaida and Emma Amos as the predatory widow Marfusha although I kept looking through her down the years to see the late and very great Diane Bull who played the role at the Almeida, an indelible stage image was Bull picking her nose with boredom then trying to get rid of the evidence on her black dress when spoken to.

There was also fine performances from Peter Egan as Ivanov's emotional uncle Shabyelski who agrees to marry widow Marfusha for her money - echoes of Ivanov and Sasha - but has the good sense to back out at the end, something the ever-vacillating Ivanov cannot do.  Possibly the performance of the evening however was Jonathan Coy as Lebedev, saddled with a penny-pinching wife but unable to get angry at his friend Ivanov; the scene where he offers a dejected Ivanov money to pay some debts was beautifully played: Lebedev's embarrassment at offering it meeting Ivanov's rigid mortification at being offered it.

Tom Pye's set seemed to have more seamless transitions than when we saw THE SEAGULL so were all the more effective as were Emma Ryott's lived-in costumes; Mark Henderson's lighting illuminated the stage wonderfully, visually linking to the characters' inner turmoil.

Rufus Norris is to be applauded for giving the Chichester Theatre's season of early Chekhov plays a wider audience and a home in the Olivier Theatre.

THE SEAGULL at the Olivier, National Theatre - David Hare meets Chekhov...

Can it really be 19 years since I saw one of my favourite plays?

Yep Constant Reader, it looks like I last saw Chekhov's THE SEAGULL in 1997 at the Donmar in a production by the English Touring Theatre. That is far too long bearing in mind the regularity I see other plays so the news that the acclaimed Young Chekhov season was transferring from Chichester to the National Theatre had me leaping to see it.  Would it be worth the leap however?

It didn't start well when one of my favourite lines - the downbeat Masha is asked why she always wears black and replies "I am in mourning for my life" - does not appear in David Hare's adaptation so I was thrown by that.  However Tom Pye's set design diverted me from my opening shock, a flooded Olivier stage brings the lake where Konstantin and Nina stage their avant-garde play right into the middle of the action although the walls of the country estate's rooms seemed to be causing trouble when we took our seats for the second half - always interesting to see a phalanx of stage techies and the sound of banging and drilling coming from behind a wall!

It's not often I say this but I think the Olivier was the wrong stage for the production - everyone seemed to have do an awful lot of travelling to get into position.  Once it is established that Olivia VinalI's Nina lives on the other side of the lake, her every appearance was made splashing noisily through the water.  She'll have trenchfoot by the end of the run. I think the more traditional Lyttelton would have been better fit. 

Although Hare's version is a bit colourless I still found much to enjoy in Chekhov's tale of wasted lives and lost opportunities for happiness.  I guess I was spoilt by my first exposure to the play: I saw a benefit performance for the Socialist Worker-funded Youth Training Centres in 1982 which starred Vanessa Redgrave and Ian Charleson in various readings and scenes, one of which was the final heartrending confrontation between Konstantin and Nina, both their lives shattered by others.

Vanessa was revisiting Nina - a role she had played onstage at the Queens Theatre in 1964 co-starring Peggy Ashcroft and Peter Finch as well as in Sidney Lumet's 1968 film version - and in 1985 I saw her again revisit THE SEAGULL at the Queens Theatre, only this time playing Arkadina opposite her daughter Natasha Richardson as Nina and Jonathan Pryce as Trigorin.

Jonathan Kent's direction had his usual clarity and unfussy dramatic through-line although I would have liked to have seen some more vivacity in the playing, the performers all seemed to play the ensemble card when there are roles in the play that come alive with some (controlled) barnstorming.  Mark Henderson's lighting is as excellent as ever.

Anna Chancellor was a commanding Madame Arkadina, almost unknowingly wanting to be the centre of attention at all times; her boredom at Konstantin's attempt at play writing all too palpable.  She came into her own with the morning-of-departure scene where Arkadina has to go from solicitation to anger to desperation to comedy: she starts being motherly to Konstantin as she changes the bandage of his 'accidental' head wound but they argue after he accuses her of financial and artistic greed, she then goes on the attack with Trigorin pleading for him to remain her lover when she realizes he wants an affair with Nina, then - secure in his agreement to stay with her - she resorts to type in making sure the servants are aware that the ruble she gave one of them is to be shared among them all.

The always dependable Geoffrey Streatfeild was a fine Trigorin, particularly in the scene where he tries to explain to the adoring Nina how it really feels to be a writer who probably will never be the top rank but whose life is still ruled by the need to write, it's a scene where you can really discern the hand of David Hare.

On the whole I liked the sulky petulance of Joshua James' Konstantin but Olivia Vinall was too over-the-top as Nina which left her nowhere to go at the end when Nina reappears as a broken-spirited regional actress, still mentally-scarred from the death of her child with Trigorin.  Peter Egan was surprisingly effective as Arkadina's  brother Sorin, forever bemoaning his life in the provincial backwaters.

The supporting cast were all okay but as I said earlier, none were particularly memorable which was slightly surprising as characters like Masha, Medvedenko and Doctor Dorn give you ample opportunities to shine.

Would I recommend it?  Yes I would but as I said, it could do with a bit less ensemble-performing and more actors taking advantage of the opportunities that Chekhov has given them.

California Dreaming...

 

A few weeks ago we saw GOOD PEOPLE by David Lindsay-Abaire, a recent off-Broadway play about the echoes of the past catching up with a woman and last week we saw another recent off-Broadway play about, um, the past catching up with a woman.  I guess when it comes to American imports there are only seven stories.

The Old Vic has reconfigured it's auditorium for Jon Robin Baitz' OTHER DESERT CITIES so it is played in the round and it was great fun to sit in that familiar theatre but with a totally new viewing experience.

 

It was also a good choice for this play.  I suspect if the play had been presented within it's proscenium arch it might not have been too involving.

Baitz has had a career on both stage and small screen - he was the creator of the Sally Field TV series "Brothers and Sisters" - and towards the end of the play The Big Reveal had all the elements of a end-of-season cliffhanger.  For the most part I enjoyed it but, as with most plays that arrive here garlanded with awards and the praise of NY critics, the overall feeling is one of thinness.

The play takes place in the luxurious Palm Springs home of ex-actor Lyman Wyeth and his ex-scriptwriter wife Polly in 2003 against a backdrop of the first Iraqi war.  The Christmas family gathering includes daughter Brooke who has just flown in from her home in New York - immediate shorthand for 'rebellious daughter' - TV executive son Trip (oh those names) and Polly's outlandish sister Silda, who co-wrote with Polly in the 1960s and now spends most of her life checking in and out of rehab.

Brooke has not visited in six years as she has been struggling with depression while attempting a follow-up to her debut novel and she soon locks ideological horns with her Republican parents while Silda snipes from the sidelines.  Trip, who produces a courtroom reality tv series, is the voice for populism and just having a happy time.  Brooke has not arrived empty-handed however as she has brought the proofs for her new book: a family memoir that includes her older brother Henry, now dead after killing himself in a terrorist bomb plot.

 

Baitz' play has distinct echoes of Edward Albee's more enigmatic A DELICATE BALANCE - married, well-off couple are beset by the wife's alcoholic sister and their resentful daughter - but, while being a general state-of-the-nation play, his work mostly touches on the responsibility of the artist using their family as inspiration, the spiky relationships between siblings both old and young, and of course, the eternal push-pull atmosphere between parents and children.

As I said, Baitz delivers a plot twist towards the end which I felt reduced the play to a soap-opera but I guess it did set up a nicely poetic final scene for Martha Plimpton's Brooke.

What I enjoyed most about the production, which was directed with a good sense of pace by Lindsay Posner, was the three central female performances: Clare Higgins, Sinead Cusack and Martha Plimpton.

Clare Higgins played Silda with her usual hard-edged style but Baitz does not really give her a good meaty scene to let rip, this addicted sister was an oddly muted character for all the fireworks that were expected.  No such problems with Sinead Cusack who was excellent as the unapologeticly right-wing Polly, a mother who views her daughter as a total stranger - an addition to the Broadway cannon of unforgiving mothers.  Martha Plimpton has morphed from being a child star of the 1980s into an accomplished stage performer and, making her London stage debut as Brooke, she was always watchable and more than held her own against two of our most charismatic actresses.

 

The men had less chance to shine against these fine actresses but Peter Egan was less milquetoast than usual as the urbane father who cracks at the seeming betrayal of his daughter's family memoir and is the keeper of A Big Secret while Daniel Lapaine had good fun as Trip, exasperated by his warring relatives.

An enjoyable play with an excellent cast but one that seemed to choose a distinctly Hollywood ending.