Platonov
by Michael Billington | September 12, 2001 | The Guardian
What do you do with Chekhov’s unwieldy first play, written when he was just 21? In 1984 Michael Frayn brilliantly turned it into a much tidier Gogolian farce called Wild Honey. David Hare’s new version sticks closer to the original, acknowledges its inconsistencies, and yet still demonstrates why Chekhov is one of theatre’s great dramatists.
Chekhov does two extraordinary things in this early work. The first is to take a literary prototype, Don Juan, and recast him in Russian terms, so that he becomes a 27-year-old provincial schoolmaster, Platonov, who is “slightly married” but immensely attractive to other women, including a widowed landowner, her young stepdaughter and an earnest chemistry student. The Chekhovian irony is that Platonov is an essentially passive figure – the pursued rather than the pursuer, the superfluous man as sex object and, as he himself confesses, one of the living dead. Chekhov’s point is that only in a world of quack doctors, land-grabbing merchants and rapacious horse thieves would Platonov acquire such fatal attraction.
