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This production is so concerned to find the lively, full-blooded side of Chekhov that it gets a little hysterical at times. It is directed by Howard Davies with a great feeling for the rhythms of the play. It has a stellar cast who give crisp, energetic performances. The adaptation by Andrew Upton is bright and contemporary, with his usual sprinkling of cheerful anachronisms. (Yepihodov's nickname here is Bozo.)
But I missed not the torpor and languor of traditional Chekhov, which Upton says in the program they have avoided, but the emotion.
Great productions of Chekhov depend on walking that notoriously fine line between comedy and tragedy. Here we have definitely fallen over on to the comic side. There is a great deal of funny business, in both senses of the phrase.
The male characters circle Robyn Nevin's Madame Ranyevskaya like moths around a street lamp and she flirts with them all, outrageously and pathetically. Nevin creates a brilliant, fragile, girlish Ranyevskaya who deserves all she gets -- an appallingly self-centred woman, but poignant in the moment of her defeat.
John Gaden's dreamy Gaev, pontificating and laughing like a fool in the face of disaster, and Peter Carroll's almost vaudevillean Firs, are mostly simple figures of fun, as are Pip Miller's Pischik, Justin Smith's Yepihodov and Dan Spielman's Trofimov. This whole side of the production is for the most part broadly comic, perhaps because they are all aristocrats or their sycophants. At the core of the production is class and its strong centre is Philip Quast's wonderful performance as the nouveau riche Lopakhin and Lucy Bell's as the adopted Varya, who, after the collapse of all her efficient managing of the estate, seethes as much with anger as with personal despair.
Quast presents Lopakhin as a man still haunted by feelings from his abject peasant childhood but then gloriously triumphant when he finally buys the estate. His great victory speech is the high point of the production. Quast and Bell provide the only truly moving moment in their playing of the famous proposal scene, Bell crouched on the floor at the end, defeated. By comparison the old serf Firs's death at the end is quite unmoving, a mere effect.
Pamela Rabe gives a nice cameo performance as Charlotta, a bizarre little character, turned by Rabe at the end into a dignified outsider claiming asylum.
It is never quite clear what Davies wants to say with this production, but the play still works, on political and individual levels, as one of the greatest in the repertoire.
© The Australian
