Con’s Score:2 Voddies
Anton Chekhov wrote some great plays which had multiple multi-layered characters, storylines and meanings, which make his stories attractive to actors and directors. Mike Mayer’s film has attracted a strong cast and I was relieved it stays true to the times, give or take a decade. (It premiered in 1894 was set in Moscow, 1904). Pity they’re not true to the accents. They all seem to have made their own choices.
Describing the plot of a Chekhov might take pages. The play is set at the family country home outside Moscow where they all gather for summer. Siron (Brian Dennehy) is old and nearing his end when we go into flashback to a summer two years earlier, when his famous acting sister Irina (Annette Bening) visits with her famous novelist and lover, Boris Trigorin (Corey Stoll). Nina’s son Konstantin (Billy Howle) is an aspiring playwright who rejects boring narrative theatre. He puts on a modern play for the family and friends, and it is not well received by all, although Nina (Saorise Ronan) his starlet, and love, is noticed by Trigorin. Masha (Elizabeth Moss) is depressingly in love with Kostatin, and she in turn is loved by Mikhail (Michael Zegen) the teacher. And that’s not all… the good Doctor Dorn (John Tenney) is in love with Irina, which upsets Polina (Mare Winningham) who is Dr Dorn’s lover and the wife of property manager. There’s a suicide attempt, jealousy, dangerous liaisons, emotions and passions run high. Soap operas don’t get as tangled as this.
The problem with Anton Chekov plays is that many directors fail to understand them in context and nature. They are set in pre-Revolution Russia where the bourgeois lived lavishly. They satirise these people, but because the characters are so well drawn, many miss this point. The Seagull is devastating in how the rich destroy the working class; as Trigorin says in his note: out of sheer boredom. There is none of that viciousness here. Apparently the play itself flopped on opening, and it wasn’t until Stanislavsky directed it many years did it get the success it deserved.
Chekov calls his plays comedies, but they’re not done in an obvious American way. Chekov likes to use irony which they don’t understand. Only Elizabeth Moss gets it. She draws laughs out of bitterness, and some of her scenes are the best. Ronan’s character as the innocent is well delivered. Annette Bening needs a montage and sharp edits to show how self-obsessed she is, otherwise she plays her character dramatically and sympathetically. It’s like Bening wants Irina to avoid ridicule, which is what she really is. All the actors don’t seem to realise they’re in a comedy.
Chekhov’s plays do have strong dialogue and he plays the spaces between the lines. The plot may be overly dramatic but his dialogue isn’t; he’s about the subtext which this production misses. It looks like Mayer struggled to direct his stars. I can forgive the accents, but not when they miss the writer’s intent.
The scenery is lush, the costumes are great but it only shows how much potential has been squandered. Instead of a biting comedy we have a mini drama and watch the spectacle of good actors reciting good lines… but it’s not real acting. It’s performance. Like the ‘play-within-a-play’ which they mocked, they seemed to have missed the point.
Con Nats – Theatre Now, On The Screen
