The
Times August 1978
This production is a good example of the Prospect Theatre Company’s
flair for reclaiming off-beat classics, and I would particularly recommend it to
anyone who was put off the play by the alleged eccentricities of the recent
Aldwych version.
There ought to be no excuse for misunderstanding Ivanov
as Chekhov took the uncharacteristic step of explaining the whole thing in two
detailed letters covering everything from his programmatic intentions to his
view of the principal characters. However,
Ivanov was misunderstood on its first
performance, misunderstood again when Chekhov rewrote it, and has lived on to
confuse modern audiences as much as its hero confuses everybody he meets in the
play.
Chekhov’s letters do not supply a golden key to its meaning.
He describes his hero as a perfectly ordinary man, drawn from life; he
also describes him as a specific literary type whom he wished to demolish. What seems clear is that the young Chekhov had suffered a
massive overdose of Hamlet, from which
he finally cured himself in The Seagull
by dislodging the Prince from central position in the person of Konstantin.
In Ivanov he still holds the centre of the stage as a
university-educated landowner, who has brought some enlightenment into his dark
provincial hole before collapsing into listless despair at the age of 35.
When we meet him, his mainspring has already snapped.
He retains an innate refinement in contrast to his boorish neighbors, but
we have to take all his finer qualities or trust from characters who knew him in
the past. Ivanov as we see him
regards himself as a worthless failure, who nevertheless assumes that everybody
will take an unlimited interest in his declarations of guilt and futility.
Without even a crown lurking in the background, this is an exceptionally
difficult assumption for any production to justify.
But Toby Robertson at least has the starting advantage of the right actor
for the part. Derek Jacobi may not
be everyone’s ideal for Hamlet, but he is supremely well cast as a romantic
runner-up. Lyrical without ever
quite touching poetry, magnetically impetuous in all situations short of the
heroic, he is an embodiment of dazzling promise cracking up at the crucial test
and, in Chekhov’s context, of the supremacy of a second-rate man in a
fourth-rate society. For all its
charm, Jacobi’s performance is most scrupulously distanced; witness its
descents into petty irritability and smugness, and its care in building up the
big speeches only to deflate them with a self-pitying whine.
The surrounding production strikes me as a stylistic success on a level
with Mr. Robertson’s A Month in the Country. It
recognizes that Chekhov’s mature plays supply no guide to his early work where
the subtle comedy of colliding egoisms mingles with forthright plot manipulation
in the manner of Ostrovsky. Mr.
Robertson finds his solution through what I can only call tonal modulation:
starting with a low-keyed naturalistic first act in Ivanov’s wretched
household and moving into the grotesque for the ensuing Lebedev party, with a
line of miserably smirking guests slumped against a wall of Robin Archer’s
funereal salon, and periodically leaping to attention to voice some resounding
cliché to Sheila Mitchell’s hatched faced hostess.
The boredom and vulgarity of which Ivanov speaks abruptly takes on a
brilliantly articulated comic form, which continues on its spiral through the
pigs’ trio for John Savident, Michael Denison, and John Cording in the third
act, and into the tragi-comic finale with two separate marriage parties sobbing
their hearts out round the cottage piano shortly before the hero joyfully blows
his brains out.
The losers are such sympathetic figures as Louise Purnell and Jane Wymark
as Ivanov’s dying wife and her girlish rival.
Theatrically, they are no match for resplendently repellant monsters like
Brenda Bruce’s title-hunting widow and Oz Clarke’s fanatic card-player; not
to mention characters like Mr. Denison’s Lebedev who gradually disclose sadly
human faces under their buffoonish masks.