We live in an age of director’s theatre. But the truly great directors enhance, rather than inhibit, their actors, as demonstrated by Lev Dodin’s masterly Chekhov production from the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg. You come away having seen a familiar play, presented in surtitled Russian, through fresh eyes.
Dodin describes this as Anton Chekhov’s “most unharmonious” play, and he shows that the Prozorov sisters are defined as much by their isolation as their shared longing for Moscow. At times they sit at the foot of the stage as if huddling together for comfort; at other moments they are separately framed in the rectangular panels of Alexander Borovosky’s set like figures in a medieval painting.
But Dodin’s great point is that this is a play of misdirected love, in which everyone seems partnered by the wrong person. Masha’s schoolmaster husband clearly belongs with his sister-in-law, Olga, whom he grapples to the ground with ferocious passion. Masha herself has to be wrenched by her husband from the arms of her lover, Vershinin, and even the youngest sister, Irina, vehemently kisses the creepy captain who goes on to kill her intended partner.
Dodin doesn’t imprison the play in a concept: he simply explores the tangled relationships through myriad details. Even if, in a production that premiered in 2010, some of the cast look too mature, the acting also has that richness of texture you find in Russian theatre.
Ksenia Rappoport’s Masha and Ekaterina Tarasova’s Irina are excellent, but what I shall remember longest is the hollow-eyed despair of Irina Tychinina’s Olga at realising too late that she should have married her brother-in-law. Ekaterina Kleopina lends unusual sympathy to Natasha, who marries into the Prozorov family and caresses the head of her husband, Andrey, on hearing him urged to leave her. Oleg Ryzantsev as Irina’s doomed lover and Sergei Kuryshev as a nihilist doctor add weight to a production where the actors don’t just perform but inhabit their roles as if they were a second skin.
