THE LITTLE DRESSMAKER. To 11 March.
London
THE LITTLE DRESSMAKER
by Linnie Redman adapted from Anton Chekhov
Union Theatre 204 Union Street SE1 To 11 March 2006
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7261 9876
www.uniontheatre.org
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 February
The playwright says in her programme note that her vision is not yet realised. I say, let us know when it is. Until then…
Linnie Redman has adapted this play from Chekhov’s story The Grasshopper. His title suits her adaptation better than the one she’s chosen. For the quiet dressmaker has little presence in the play. Her mistress Olga Ivanovna, the grasshopper flitting around local artistic circles, is the central character.
Redman’s adaptation gets most things wrong. Chekhov, doctor by trade, writer by choice, could make more of comparative values even with a character who, like Olga’s doctor/husband, remains in the background till he dies slowly offstage. How Olga came to marry him remains unclear (it needs only a sentence or two in a story, but things needs showing on stage).
Here, on entering the Union’s auditorium, we’re immediately plunged into the artistic world with a piano-duet Dvorak Slavonic Dance and a Chopin Polonaise (both played, impressively, live), to be followed by more piano, violin and singing (too pop-nasal, but the style might have afflicted 19th century salons too).
Matters aren’t helped by an awkward staging that can be prouder of its musicianship than its acting. The exception is Amy Stratton’s Olga, who progresses through light-headed enjoyment and carelessness for her husband to disillusion when her artist-lover drops her, then remorse and determination to be better. The sadder, wiser figure caught in a final spotlight, all the bustle around her gone, has grown organically from the figure we have seen bubblingly shallow or humiliated by her naked portrait. (Her story is a tragic version of Sheridan’s would-be fashionable Lady Teazle.)
As the worthy dressmaker, Anna Lanyon works competently but has too little to work upon. And while Liam Smith’s Writer is merely another, undeveloped artistic butterfly, Smith brings due gravity to his later medical role, quietly yet firmly judgmental of Olga, praising her dying husband (his illness implicitly self-induced in despair at her behaviour).
Two black-clad, near-silent doctors, their heads bowed in birdlike poses, pick up the crow theme that’s run through the play – one of the adaptation’s more successful theatrical devices. But it’s the acting that matters, and too much of it is too woefully wooden or one-dimensional to make a positive impact.
Olga Ivanovna: Amy Stratton
Anna: Anna Lanyon
The Actress/A Doctor: Deborah Hewitt
The Musician/A Doctor: David Laughton
The Writer/Korostelov: Liam Smith
Isaac Ryabovsky: Harry Long
Osip Dymov: Jack Reid
Director: Linnie Redman
Lighting: Steve Miller
Composer/Musical Director: Joe Evans
Oil Painting: Paul Baden
2006-02-27 00:23:36