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.
I
thought perhaps this time Benedict Andrews’ mise
en scène would make sense, that his staging techniques and or Effects would
be justified by the production’s context and or the text’s demands. Being the
fourth production of Andrews’ that I have seen – Measure for Measure (Company B Belvoir, 2010), The Seagull (Belvoir, 2011), Every
Breath (Belvoir, 2012) – I thought that perhaps I had seen it all (in many
respects, I suppose I have), but The Maids
only confirmed the fact that Andrews is perhaps on a different planet to most
people, especially myself.
In
some ways, I think I understand what he is trying to do, it’s just that his
execution and implementation – his deployment and reliance upon– of Effects end
up distracting from any kind of message or examination he could be trying to
make or conduct. For instance: I understand the notion of constant surveillance
that pervaded Measure for Measure
(and now The Maids), but the
live-video-feeding cameras on large screens on either side of the stage meant
you were watching them not the actors on stage. I understand the idea of the
storm in The Seagull,
but to have ‘ash’ falling from the heavens and not be referenced at all in the
dialogue seems clumsy, immature. To depict (frequent) sex acts on stage seemed
to negate any point he may have been making, and turned Every Breath
into a farce. So now in The Maids,
when we have glass walls on either side of the stage, mirrors, a live
video-feed from seen and unseen cameras dotted around the stage perimeter and
dressing; when the set is destroyed (to an extent) and sex acts hinted at
though never fully realised; when characters seem to actually use an on-stage
toilet, it really does feel like we have seen it all before. And I guess we
have.
