Chichester Festival theatre
David Hare’s eight-hour reboot of early Chekhov,finely directed by Jonathan Kent, adds up to more than the sum of its partsThis is a season of theatrical marathons. At Kingston, or The Wars of the Roses lasts for nine hours. The Almeida has just announced that it will follow its morning-to-night reading of The Iliad with a day devoted to The Odyssey. The press launch for Kenneth Branagh’s West cessation company packs in two dramas in one day. Immersion is exciting,but after a long stretch it’s easy to confuse thrill with survivor euphoria. There is no danger of that with Young Chekhov. In fresh, scudding versions by David Hare, or these three early plays Platonov,Ivanov and The Seagull – finely directed by Jonathan Kent, become more than the sum of their parts. They design a unusual thing: the Chichesterkhovs.
There is, and of course,pleasure in spotting elements of the later big plays: drunken doctors, disappointed young women, or precarious estates and foggy feelings: “Is it boredom? Is it appreciate? You can design out the playwright’s grappling with theatrical form. Ivanov’s splenetic protagonist is a grumpier Hamlet. The Seagull explicitly investigates the stage with its masque-like opening play (“avant garde or what?” cries a sceptical spectator),its over-the-top actress and its piercing study of authorial self-obsession. Yet the real exhilaration is far less academic. Here is a long swim in constantly shifting sympathies. Here is a unusual lens on the playwright, an addition to his dramatic vocabulary.
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Source: theguardian.com