When the plastic curtains open on Katie Mitchell's production of Chekhov's early play, Owen Teale's Ivanov is revealed, stranded on an island stage that cuts the audience in half. The Cottesloe punters stare at each other through the haze of Ivanov's unhappiness and despair.
No man is an island, but Ivanov is making a pretty good job of it. A former reforming landowner, a man held in respect and affection, a man who would take risks, he has lost all zest for life. His estate is heavily in debt and he no longer loves his dying wife who sacrificed everything for him: her Jewish religion, her fortune, her family. He can no longer even put an arm around her fragile frame. The more he despises himself, the more he despairs.
And who wouldn't despair, living in this provincial backwater of vicious gossip, money-grubbing matrons and religious prejudice? No wonder one of characters says: "I'm so bored I want to take a run at a wall." You would think there would be a queue.
Boredom has never been so exquisitely torturous as it is in Mitchell's wonderful and wonderfully acted production. We know these people: the penniless count who is a waste of space; the lonely, wealthy widow who would like to be a countess; the doctor corrupted by his own indignation; the hen-pecked husband. We know them from Chekhov's later, perhaps greater plays, but we know them from our own experience, too, just as we know Ivanov, the man who has allowed all the life to be squeezed out of him and is old by 35.
These people are dead men and women walking. Paule Constable's spine-tingling lighting is all lengthening, hardening shadows that make people look like ghosts. A cello wails in mourning. Life is snuffed out in a twinkling in a stuffy little corridor that needs a lick of paint. No heroics, no screaming, probably not too many tears. That's just the way life is. Get on with it.
Until October 12. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
