Indefiniteness*: ATYP, MopHead & Catnip Productions’ Platonov

After Shakespeare’s, Anton Chekhov’s plays are perhaps the most human. Literary critic James Woods believes Chekhov’s characters “act like free consciousness, not as owned literary characters, [that they] forget to be Chekhov’s characters,” such is the way the playwright allows them simply to be. Both Shakespeare and Chekhov, as playwright David Hare writes, “respected the absolute complexity of life [and] never allowed their creations to be used for any other purpose than being themselves.” Not only a humanist, Chekhov was also a political writer, as socially and specifically pointed as Tolstoy, Gorky, Shakespeare. But while everyone celebrates Chekhov’s mastery in his four most well-known works – the plays The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard – his short stories are also exceptional, as are his rougher earlier plays, Platonov and Ivanov.

The story of a group of young idealists with the whole world ahead of them, Platonov – like so much of Chekhov, as in life – is about love, relationships, the people who get under our skin, and the extraordinary lengths we go to rid ourselves of feeling too much. Specifically, it is about Platonov, a provincial schoolteacher, “who faces up to the implications of being irresistibly attractive to four different women.” Presented here by MopHead and Catnip Productions in conjunction with ATYP Selects, this Platonov is bursting with passion, sexual energy and desperation, and in Anthony Skuse’s adaptation it explodes across the ATYP Studio stage in a riot of colour, emotion and drinking.

Molière this!: Bell Shakespeare’s Tartuffe

Following in the wake of the tiresome and convoluted adaptation/new version vs. new plays-and-textual fidelity debate (most of last year), comes another of Justin Fleming’s versions of one of Molière’s plays. Last seen in Bell Shakespeare’s The School for Wives in 2012, Fleming’s skill lies not just in translating Molière’s (French) rhymes into modern Australian ones, but in the panache, flair, wit and verve with which he carries it all off. In Fleming’s Tartuffe, currently playing at the Opera House’s Drama Theatre, director Peter Evans summons up every inch of baroque stateliness inherent in Molière-via-Fleming’s script, and runs with it, creating a sugary confection which simply must be seen to be believed.

Tonight we fly: Belvoir's Peter Pan

It’s surely the best opening in literature: “All children, except one, grow up.” As J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a tale of childhood and growing up – of dreaming and pirates, adventures and flying and giant ticking crocodiles – unfolds across the walls of your mind (and, appropriately, the open-book corner of Belvoir’s upstairs theatre), it’s hard not to feel as though you’re a part of it, whether you’re an adult, a child, or a child-at-heart.

Nothing compares to or prepares you for the homespun earthy magic of Belvoir’s production. Directed by Ralph Myers, Belvoir’s Peter Pan is just about the most beautiful piece of theatre you could see this summer, full of the crazy infectious kind of dreaming and playing and make-believe that children excel at so well, and it’s a tribute to the collective imaginations – of both the creative team, the cast, and the audience – that this production works as well as it does.