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Platonov at the Almeida Theatre – Review

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Anton Chekhov in a new version by David Hare

by Philip Fisher | British Theatre Guide

“My life is in ruins and all you can do is joke about it”. This sums up the effect that Mikhail Platonov has on everybody that he encounters. There are four young women in this play and each of them falls desperately in love with the eponymous hero. After a brief spell of great happiness, suicidal disaster inevitably follows.

The set for David Hare’s new version is designed by Paul Brown to fit in the larger auditorium at the Almeida King’s Cross. It is one of the most impressive that can ever have been seen on a stage in England. In part, this is because the old railway sheds that make up the Almeida’s temporary home are so wide. It is possible to contain within the space a field of sunflowers, a wooden bungalow that also symbolically looks like a mausoleum, a garden, a stream which suddenly yields up a railroad track and the edge of a wood.

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Platonov at the Almeida – Review

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Helen McCrory Navigates a Full Spectrum of Emotion

By Matt Wolf | September 16, 2001 | Variety

“She’s an astonishing woman,” the terminally idle and self-loathing schoolmaster Platonov (Aidan Gillen) says of young widow Anna Petrovna (Helen McCrory), one of the many women buzzing about Platonov like moths drawn to a lethal and devouring flame. Coming nearly three hours into Jonathan Kent’s Almeida Theater premiere of David Hare’s fresh take on Chekhov’s once-abandoned and unruly play, Platonov’s assessment is equally applicable to the staging’s leading lady, McCrory, who navigates such a full spectrum of emotion that “astonishing” doesn’t seem to do her justice. (The actress’s previous legit credits include the London preem of “How I Learned to Drive.”)

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Platonov at The Almeida: Review

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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.

Categories In a Land of Plenty Print Media Reviews

Review: In a Land of Plenty on BBC2

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Helen McCrory is Stunning as Mary Freeman

by Ian Jones | January 24, 2001 |  OfftheTelly

This time last year BBC2 were in the middle of screening their much-hyped adaptation of Gormenghast. It ended up falling way short of expectation. The supposedly breathtaking special effects just looked ludicrous on the small screen, while too many dreadful celebrities turned up to mutter one sentence before dying. It was an attempt by the Beeb at filming a supposedly unfilmable text just for the sake of it. One year on and we’re almost half way through the transmission of another supposedly unfilmable book on BBC2, but this time the results are blissfully different.

In a Land of Plenty is already one of the best pieces of drama on British television ever. It shares its refreshingly simple premise with another acclaimed BBC series, Our Friends in the North: following the fortunes of a group of characters over time. However this is not an original drama but an inspired treatment of a novel by Tim Pears, and focuses on a family rather than a group of friends.

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Categories In a Land of Plenty Video

Video: In a Land of Plenty

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Episodes 1 – 10

by Helenistic | You Tube /Wikipedia | August 5, 2018

In A Land Of Plenty is a 10-episode British television drama serial produced by Sterling Pictures and Talkback for BBC Two in the United Kingdom. Adapted for television by Kevin Hood and Neil Biswas from the novel by Tim Pears., it was first broadcast in the United Kingdom starting on January 10, 2001 and describes a sprawling family saga taking place from the 1950s to the 1990s in England. Through the lives, deaths, tragedies and loves of the Freeman family, the series charts how Britain was shaped after World War II. It was subsequently broadcast in the USA on BBC America. The show was co-financed between WGBH-TV and the BBC and was produced by Michael Riley and John Chapman. Executive Producers were Peter Fincham and Tessa Ross. The soundtrack was written by composer and musician Jocelyn Pook.

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