Chekhov
Marianka Swain
This year’s Olivier Awards saw the Young Vic trounce its South Bank neighbours, with Ivo van Hove’s revolutionary A View from the Bridge leading 11 nominations and four wins; the production opens on Broadway next week. It reflects an extraordinary period during which the theatre, originally an offshoot of the National, has grown to become one of Britain’s major creative powerhouses – all under the aegis of South African-born David Lan, artistic director since 2000.Following a £12.5 million revamp, the Young Vic now attracts daring experimental artists from Europe and beyond, both Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hamlet instructs his players to "hold...the mirror up to nature”, advice taken literally in this arresting 120-year anniversary staging of Chekhov’s homage to the Bard. Jon Bausor’s set is dominated by a vast angled mirror, offering an appropriately bird’s-eye view and lending cinematic scope to this familial tale. It’s also the perfect encapsulation of a group who need their image reflected back at them through the admiration of others in order to satisfy their egos. The lakeside country house might be teeming with passions, but this love, notes Torben Betts’s pithy free adaptation, “is all Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu), is a monumental film. Not merely in its scale – though at 196 minutes, it certainly clocks in on that front – but in its emotional heft.It’s like one of the great Russian novels, and in his seventh feature Ceylan shows the influence of that country’s culture more strongly than ever (remember the direct references to Andrei Tarkovsky in the wintry Istanbul of Uzak, his first prize-winner at Cannes back in 2003?).This time his script, as acknowledged in the film’s closing titles, is a loose Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner is an epic chamber piece by a contemporary great. From the moment a stone suddenly smashes the car window of landlord Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), physical threat darkens the corners of the remote Anatolian hotel-home he shares with his bitter, bored sister Necla (Demet Akbao) and young, emotionally dying wife Nihal (Melisa Sozen). But unlike Ceylan’s previous sagas, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Three Monkeys, the violence remains verbal.Aydin, an ex-actor who never quite made it, leads a comfortable, unchallenged life in a home that’s likened to a Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Ghosts are walking at the Young Vic. Katie Mitchell’s stark, startling production of Chekhov’s final lament is not just an evocation of a lost era, but a summoning of the spirits haunting Vicki Mortimer’s chilling sepulchral mansion. This is a Cherry Orchard cast into shadow – literal and figurative – but pulsing with furious energy. The past will not go gentle into that good night; it calls out in a keening cry.At just one hour 50, Simon Stephens’ taut adaptation combines elegy with economy. The stripped-back text suits Mitchell’s absolute clarity of purpose, although the excised repetition Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Fresh from global domination with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, currently garnering rapturous reviews on Broadway, inexhaustible playwright and adaptor Simon Stephens has swapped Mark Haddon for Anton Chekhov and a new version of The Cherry Orchard, now previewing at the Young Vic. It’s not his first time bringing late-19th-century work to the venue, having enjoyed enormous success with A Doll’s House in 2012, but it is his first time tackling Chekhov, who he readily professes is his all-time writing hero. No pressure, then.Stockport-born Stephens, whose playwriting Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Purists may take issue with Anya Reiss’s incursion into the classics. Having already tackled The Seagull and Three Sisters, she’s now turned her dogged 21st-century gaze on Uncle Vanya. But Reiss’s adaptation, though fresh and punchy, is notable, in fact, for its amiable fidelity. The framing is in place for a provocative revamp, yet, in appropriately Chekhovian fashion, Reiss appears to have hit some kind of a psychological barrier partway through the process. This is one of the wittier versions you’ll encounter, honouring the comedy in “tragicomedy”, but it never develops an audacious Read more ...
David Nice
London has had its fair share recently of Chekhov productions from Russia, though none anywhere near as quietly truthful as these from Moscow's Mossovet State Academic Theatre. Veteran film and theatre director-designer Andrey Konchalovsky understands how lives may fall apart or hang in the balance while human beings sip a cup of tea, strum an out-of-tune piano or push a pram.What's more, his admirable actors – at last a true Moscow ensemble, at least in this Three Sisters – can play several parts which seemingly share so much in common between the two plays, and yet they make complete Read more ...
Anya Reiss
About a week after my modern adaptation of The Seagull closed in 2012 at Southwark Playhouse the director Russell Bolam texted me, "Same again?" So it’s now in 2014 that at (the new) Southwark Playhouse we’ve got our modern take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which has just opened.I made it modern because I can’t see any other reason for me to do it. There are loads of eloquent, clever versions of the original knocking around and I don’t feel any need to throw another one in unless I’m doing something different. The reason to make it modern though is more than that, and I have more than a Read more ...
Heather Neill
If only there were more Chekhov! Theatregoers in England, for whom Anton Pavlovich is little short of a god, must have wished this often enough. The handful of great plays come round almost as frequently as Shakespeare. Yet, as well as a couple of lesser plays and some crude farces, Chekhov wrote almost 600 short stories, counting the comic squibs with which he helped to support his family as a very young man. Some of the more mature ones are masterpieces, works of extraordinary imagination and psychological insight. He occasionally adapted them himself and others have done since. Now William Read more ...
David Nice
Hot on the heels of the latest English uncle over at the Vaudeville comes Dyadya Vanya from Moscow, bringing with it no samovar or old lace. Rimas Tuminas, the Vakhtangov Theatre's artistic director since 2007, has chucked out the Stanislavsky tradition of Chekhovian naturalism and in his own singular attempt to render what he thinks the characters feel as well as say serves up a stylised ritual that nearly suffocates the humanity of the drama.There's no problem in daring a radical re-think: Benedict Andrews's contemporary take on Three Sisters at the Young Vic mostly made sense on its own Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov’s tragi-comic drama of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End. But first, London has Linsday Posner’s staging, with a mouthwatering cast and a poised, ruefully witty translation by Christopher Hampton.There’s nothing here to startle, and in some ways that’s rather to the endeavour’s detriment. Christopher Oram’s set, of a timbered dacha that vaguely resembles a giant Swiss cuckoo clock, is so hefty and literal that in the opening scene it seems on the verge of crushing Read more ...