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.
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.
