IVANOV. To 29 November.

London.

IVANOV
by Anton Chekhov in a new version by Tom Stoppard.

Wyndhams Theatre To 29 November 2008.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 2.30pm Sun 3pm.
Audio-described 18 Oct. 2.30pm.
Captioned 12 Nov 7.30pm.
Runs 2hr 35min One interval.

TICKETS: 0844 482 5120.
www.donmarwestend.com/www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk (£1.50 booking fee per ticket by ‘phone and online).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 September.

A great playwright’s apprentice work given a masterpiece production.
Anton Chekhov, who died aged 44 of tuberculosis, had 17 years earlier written this play in which a young wife dies of tuberculosis. Chekhov, the medical man, makes doctor Lvov the only scientific, reasonable character in Ivanov.

The writer who understood and forgave all here creates a world of meanness, grime, debt and desperation. The playwright who reflected upon life, a precious commodity too easily wasted, employs guns, as in several of his plays. As with exits and entries, or the uncoiling of characters through structured circumstances, Chekhov is learning his craft. Contrast the sudden, unprepared suicide here with that ending Seagull.

Michael Grandage’s outstanding, and supremely well-acted, production tries to make a virtue of the suddenness, everyone crowding to look at the offstage death, a brave attempt to cover a dramatic deficiency that the playwright himself resolved in the later play, where death also comes with the sense of being superfluous to life after a long, intense exchange between characters of ill-matched love.

In later plays Chekhov showed people’s fates decided through mundane talk; here it’s more through hot air. As words are wasted in shedloads, the most moving moments – showing greatness already on its way – are silent; Kenneth Branagh’s Ivanov crumpling under his desk in humiliation when offered a loan, or stopping mid-tirade against the wife who never brought the expected dowry, shocked at his own cruelty.

Grandage, helped by Tom Stoppard’s clear, witty translation and Branagh’s sympathetic presence, delays revealing the full horror through masks of lightness and side-orders of comic characters. Similarly, Christopher Oram’s set, with its rusting farmscape and mucky attic, conceals the full roughness of skinflint moneylender Zinaida’s home in its first, merely dull candlelit presence, only revealing the full neglect on her daughter’s wedding-day.

Aided by Adam Cork’s intense score and occasional atmospheric underpinnings, this is an exciting chance to see Chekhov saying farewell to monologue and melodrama. But not to comedy; the opening scene foreshadows The Bear, a brief farce from the following year. And certainly not to the orchestration of human efforts at happiness and the misery resulting from unhappy hearts.

Ivanov: Kenneth Branagh.
Barkin: Lorcan Cranitch.
Shabelsky: Malcolm Sinclair.
Anna Petrovna: Gina McKee.
Lvov: Tom Hiddleston.
Zinaida: Sylvestra Le Touzel.
Babakina: Lucy Briers.
Yacob: Malcolm Ridley.
Anasim: Ian Drysdale.
Nikander: James Howard.
Kosykh: James Tucker.
Yegorushka/Pyotr: John Atterbury.
Avdotya: Linda Broughton.
Natalia: Emma Beattie.
Lebedev: Kevin R McNally.
Sasha: Andrea Riseborough.Gavrila: Jonathan Battersby.
Lipa: Giovanna Falcone.

Director: Michael Grandage.
Designer: Christopher Oram.
Lighting: Paule Constable.
Sound/Composer: Adam Cork.
Wigs/Hair: Richard Mawby.
Associate director: Ben Woolf.
Associate designers: Andrew Edwards, Morgan Large.
Assistant designer: Richard Kent.

2008-09-19 01:20:58