Young Chekhov

Platonov, Ivanov and The Seagull reversioned by David Hare

seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 13 August 2016

Anton Chekhov's three early plays - the first of which was not performed in his lifetime - were presented last year at the Chichester Festival as a unified insight into the dramatist's development. Most of the original cast have been reassembled to present the plays in London this summer. The three plays were directed by Jonathan Kent and the sets - variations on Russian country estates - were designed by Tom Pye.

In many ways the best way to appreciate this ambitious undertaking is to see all three plays on the same day. Patterns and themes emerge - there are references to Hamlet in each play; there is a significant part for a doctor in each play, though the three doctors are utterly different in style and personality; there is an idealistic but frustrated young man in each, colliding with an idealistic and frustrated young woman with painful consequences; surrounding the main characters are an assortment of hangers-on, older but not necessarily wiser relatives who are part of a wider and often stifling society. But the fascination of all this is that though the situations may appear similar in bald summary, the tone of each play, and the way the characters interact (or fail to interact) in each, makes for a wide and rich spectrum of human behaviour. Chekhov is revealed to be the master of social comedy and romantic melodrama just as much as his more well-known bittersweet examination of thwarted idealism and crippling ennui. 

In Platonov Anna Petrovna (Nina Sosanya), widowed and in deep financial distress, is the focus of attention for several predatory males, but her precarious position is only one amongst several unhappinesses in the play. We sense longstanding rivalries between local merchants, resentments between neighboring landowners, generational tensions, and marital discords. Mikhail Vasilievich Platonov (a superb James McArdle) is referred to somewhat indulgently as a bit of a loose cannon but as soon as he arrives on stage he is electrically disruptive. Women fall for him; he falls for women; he teases and insults one, castigates another for having fallen away from youthful activism. He could be insufferable, especially as he always contrives to interpret any threatening or embarrassing situation as being someone else's fault, but in James McArdle's performance he maintains a wide-eyed innocence that is utterly captivating. Even when his infuriated friend and brother-in-law Doctor Triletsky (Joshua James) tries to unmask him as merely a self-obsessed manipulator Platonov's intense emotional pitch makes the doctor's efforts look cheap (not least because he is elsewhere something of a wastrel himself). Unfortunately Platonv's maddening and anarchic approach to life is too much for Sofya (Olivia Vinall), a newly married young woman he had known when they were students, Their meeting at Anna Petrovna's house seems at first just another strand of the social comedy brought about by ill-assorted guests enduring hot summer weather, but in the final moments of the play it proves fatal.

In Ivanov we see a different sort of falling away. Where Platonov castigates himself for having fallen away from his grand plans for himself, it seems belied by his fizzing energy (even if this is being dissipated rather than channelled). But Nikolai Ivanov (Geoffrey Streatfield) is full of self-loathing, far more tramelled by his debts, his now loveless marriage, and his sense of isolation. His wife is dying, yet he refuses to focus on this fact, infuriating the doctor of this play, Yevgeni Lvov (James McArdle again, as buttoned down and full of self-righteous rectitude as it is possible to be). Ivanov's wife, coincidentally also an Anna Petrovna, and again played by Nina Sosanya, is a convert from Judaism, so as well as being terminally ill she is completely cut off from her family and her past; Ivanov's coldness can only be another bitter and unexpected blow to her, brutally confirmed when she accidentally sees him kissing the daughter of his main creditor during a soiree attended by the hideously vulgar provincial society surrounding the Ivanovs. What seems like the clumsy outcome of a 'mid-life crisis' to him looks to the outside world like sordid avarice; he was denied the fortune of his first wife's family, and so his plan to marry Sasha (Olivia Vinall in her second incarnation as the idealistic young woman) looks like just another attempt at financial gain - only his own self-disgust causes him to shoot himself rather than go through with this plan.

The Seagull is the best known of these plays, having for long been considered the first of the mature masterpieces, but in this context it continues with another refraction of the themes of idealism, frustration and despair. Joshua James is now the focus of young male tragedy, as Konstantin is caught impossibly between a loved but unsympathetically possessive mother, an unrequited love for his childhood friend Nina, and a desire to make something new in art. With a longer time frame than the other two plays, we see his trajectory far more clearly and painfully, instead of having to rely on assertions or hearsay to know what either Platonov or Ivanov were really like as younger men. But we also witness Nina's career as well, Olivia Vinall giving us the heady enthusiasm of an innocent girl for a life she can hardly dare hope for, only to find it crushed by the treatment meted out to her by the feckless Trigorin (Geoffrey Streatfield playing a far more worldly-wise litterateur against Konstantin's earnest iconoclasm). Neither Nina nor Konstantin has the strength to withstand the imperious and self-centred Arkadina, who is mystified by what she chooses to regard as her son's waywardness, and who has no intention of relinquishing her hold on Trigorin, or even of admitting that Nina has any talent at all. Another suicide brings to an end another impasse.

An engrossing day - an immersive experience to be treasured. The wonderful set, mainly giving an exterior on a country estate, with a stream or lake to one side (the more free spirited characters tended to walk through the water instead of using the footbridges provided), also revealed interiors of appropriate disorder, pretension or taste with a minimum of fuss. The outstanding cast ensured that nothing seemed repetitive, instead revealing Chekhov's wonderful skill in showing us both the follies and the tragedies of unfulfilled life.