Love will tear us apart, again: STC’s The Present

This review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.

Chekhov’s reputation as a writer rests upon the legacy of his four major plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard) and his short stories. Generally dismissed as juvenilia or the work of an amateur writer, his earlier plays – and particularly the play we generally call Platonov – should not be so easily dismissed. While sources and critics disagree as to its exact creation, the consensus is it was written when he was just eighteen, and finished a few years later as a student in Moscow, and was originally intended for a notable actress, in the hope she would stage it for her benefit performance. Sources cannot agree on what happened next, but a (the?) manuscript was discovered in 1914 (or 1920, depending on who you believe), and it has only been since the 1950s that the play has found a wider popular and critical audience, and it has been restored to its rightful place in Chekhov’s oeuvre.

STC's Endgame

Samuel Beckett is revered as an absurdist avant-garde writer and playwright whose works frequently break with the conventions of the time and forge new paths through the literary landscape. Perhaps most well-known for Waiting for Godot, his work offers a dismally bleak and darkly tragicomic outlook on life, but try as we might now to bring a freshness to these sixty-year-old plays, it feels like Beckett’s original relevance is now wearing thin and that these works are starting to show their age.

Premiered in 1957, Endgame famously stars Hamm (a man who is blind and cannot stand), his servant Clov (who is unable to sit), and his parents Nell and Nagg (who are both legless, and live in garbage bins). Bound as each of them are to their positions on stage, the play has a certain staticness to it, a caged-in-ness to it, whereby nobody can move, no one can leave, and the only way out is death. It is undeniably nihilistic in its view of the world, and it makes for gruelling viewing.

Cyranose: STC’s Cyrano de Bergerac

His is the nose that launched a thousand quips. A famous literary swashbuckler in the same league as Dumas’ musketeers, Cyrano de Bergerac was, incredibly, a real writer and philosopher in France in the early seventeenth century. Imbued with the famous proboscis and a life much embellished beyond reality, Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is a romantic swashbuckler like no other. With an uncanny gift for words – his pen, they say, is as mighty as his sword – he is both heroic and hopeless in the face of love, and his story is one of love – lost, won, and unrequited, and is as humane as his nose is larger than life.

While Rostand’s play was written in 1897, the Sydney Theatre Company’s production uses Andrew Upton’s adaptation from 1999 in an updated version, and is set in Cyrano’s own mid-seventeenth century world with much flair and panache. It is the story of Cyrano, a man who is blessed with an unfortunately large nose, and who is in love with Roxane. Roxane is in love with Christian. Christian is in love with Roxane but cannot express it anywhere near as adequately as he’d like. Cyrano agrees to help him and, well, I’ll leave the rest up to you. But as lofty and as word-drunk as the play – as Cyrano – is, there is still a sparseness, an disconnection between the period flummery in the costumes and the occasionally spare mise-en-scène (designed by Alice Babidge with Renée Mulder), and Upton’s adaptation.

Gorking: STC’s Children of the Sun

In his writer’s note titled, appropriately enough, ‘Grappling with Gorky,’ Andrew Upton talks about the optimism of Russian writers. “But not blind optimism, an optimism despite the obvious impossibility of salvation.” You can see it the work of Tolstoy, Pasternak, Chekhov, Gorky. Not just optimism but a need to tell stories, to examine and investigate the dynamics of human interactions and the world they find themselves caught up in. Earlier in the year, I had the good fortune to see State Theatre Company of South Australia’s production of The Seagull in Adelaide, and between that production and Sydney Theatre Company’s Children of the Sun, there is a precious kind of alchemy at work, a resonance in style, a conversation between plays and ideas which is beautiful to behold.

Further on and further up: STC’s Travelling North

The idea of ‘going north’ is firmly rooted in the Australian psyche. Analogous perhaps with the great (American) road trip and the immense body of literature that has spawned from it, from Kerouac’s On The Road and Nabokov’s Lolita, to home-grown classics such as Michael Gow’s The Kid and Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (albeit partly in reverse), as well as the life-affirming Bran Nue Dae. There is the myth of the bush, the untameable wetlands and inhospitable red desert; the cattle-owners, the crocodile wrestlers, “the serial killers, salt-of-the-earth stalwarts, bigots [and] drag queens,” as Ailsa Piper writes in the program. Simply put, “the north is epic,” just as its allure is irresistible, and not just in a physical literal sense of ‘going north’.

The road trip has long been associated with coming-of-age stories and journeys of self-discovery. So it is in David Williamson’s Travelling North, presented here by Sydney Theatre Company. And while Williamson’s protagonists might be a generation or two older than most other literary road-trippers, the process of change and discovery, of soul-searching and path-finding, of going deeper in and further up, still speaks to our restless twenty-first century mindset as much as it did in 1979 when it premiered.

Waiting for the man: STC’s Waiting for Godot

First performed in Paris in 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of those cultural phenomena that can be endlessly referenced, adapted and mimicked by just about anybody and yet none of its original power or intent is lost. Essentially the story of two displaced people, tramps we could suppose, it is, famously, a play where ‘nothing’ happens, twice over. Initially opening to hostile reviews in London in 1955, Beckett’s play went on to break the mould of the “star-actor’s theatre,” and pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in playwriting and in theatre, both linguistically, performatively, in a script, as well as “the expectation of success from stardom.”

The story of Vladimir and Estragon, Waiting for Godot is a perhaps a kind of Groundhog Day for these two tramps, an endless succession of phrases and ideas, actions, beats and moments, that never really seem to mean anything at all. And yet amongst this nothingness, there is a kind of warmth, a kind of shared humanity between us and Vladimir and Estragon, the hapless Lucky and the rotund Pozzo, the messenger boy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, and directed by Andrew Upton (after Tamás Ascher was rendered unfit to travel), this Godot is a treat to behold.