Beg, borrow or steal a standing room ticket (all thatТs available for this sold out season) for this production at Belvoir Street. You will be treated to a landmark, breathtaking production that showcases some great acting.
Director Benedict Andrews has updated and transposed the setting to a small Australian coastal village in the middle of nowhere, but it works, and is achingly contemporary and relevant.
ChekhovТs play is an analysis of the act of creativity, of writing , and also asks: what is theatre? Is theatre still relevant today? He also seeks to analyze the meaning of love, and deeply plumbs the Russian melancholia.
His young, bitterly passionate Konstantin (Kostya) is superbly played by Dylan Young, full of angst, in his bravura Belvoir debut.
KonstantinТs late middle aged mother, Irina Arkadina, once a famous actress and now struggling somewhat, is brilliantly played by Judy Davis as stressed, imperious, neurotic and self-centred (or is she)? Is her hysterical, attempted re-seduction of her lover Trigorin when he announces he is leaving acting, or real? Is she in some ways trying to be Ophelia (or should that be Gertrude)?
Famous writer Trigorin (craggily handsome David Wenham), exemplifying typical caddish male behavoiur, is also used as a mouthpiece to analyze the whys and wherefores of creativity and writing and what Сbeing famousТ entails .Lots of thought provoking ideas and issues are raised by him.
Retired dapper Doctor Yvengy Dorn is avuncularly played by Bille Brown in marvelous form. (We feel like cheering when he expresses his support of KonstantinТs play). As ill, chatty lawyer Pyotr Sorin, ArkadinaТs brother, John Gaden has much fun.
Emily BarclayТs Masha is marvelous, played as a Goth-like creature in black torn tights and a tattoo or two. She is trapped in her life, unable to escape Ц no wonder she is in black: Сin mourning for her lifeТ. Strained, tense, and yearning with anguish, like many of the women in ChekhovТs plays she suffers badly Ц as does the real heroine of the play: Nina (Maeve Dermody) who longs to be an actress and escape the provincial town she is stuck in.
Exquisite, especially in Act One, at times she looks like a 16th Century Italian Madonna or a glowing flower (the change in Act Two is startling).
Overwrought, tense, mostly mousy Polina is excellently played by Anita Hegh. MashaТs rather dull, nerdy husband school teacher Semyon (Gareth Davies) is also trapped by societyТs expectations.
Ralph MyerТs set design is in some ways a Сwhite boxТ affair, evoking the crowded rooms of a 1950Тs fibro holiday shack; squeezing in bunks, white vertical drapes or roller blinds, and a piano, as well as fully functioning taps for water .
KonstantinТs play in Act One, with Nina in the large clear box with her long hair down, stylistically references last yearТs Measure for Measure and also possibly the STCТs The Trojan Women in some ways. It is certainly at the cutting edge of experimental theatre, so to speak.
Is Andrews aiming for a Brechtian Сalienation effectТ with the use of the huge СReal LifeТ neon signs wheeled on and off at times?
I was fine, but asthmatics beware Ц much use is made at times of billowing dry ice fog. Other contemporary devices include the use of iPhones and laptops, microphones, and the use of Bowie and Springsteen songs in the devised soundtrack .
The СAustralianisationТ of this production really works, yet an intrinsically Russian sense of tragedy and melancholia still permeate the show. As in ChekhovТs Three Sisters, some of the characters eventually learn how to simply endure Ц to go on, even when it feels like you canТt. УEverything exists for the sake of the story,Ф as Trigorin says.
Not to be missed.
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