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Uncle Vanya at Donmar Warehouse – Review

On September 19, 2002May 1, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

An all-star Cast Perform at the Donmar

by Steve Schifferes | September 19, 2002 | BBC News Online

Helen McCrory, Mark Strong, Emily Watson and Simon Russell Beale

It was luvvies night at the Donmar in London.

The small foyer was crowded with stars as Hollywood film director Sam Mendes launched his last series of plays at the small theatre where he has made his name.

And he did not disappoint them, producing a spectacular version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, played (as it should be) as a black comedy and paired in repertoire with Twelfth Night.

Simon Russell Beale played Vanya as a bumbling fool, just as he played Hamlet a few years back in a famous production at the National.

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Platonov Print Media Reviews

Platonov at the Almeida Theatre – Review

On September 20, 2001May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

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 Print Media Reviews

Platonov at the Almeida – Review

On September 16, 2001May 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

“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 Print Media Reviews

Platonov at The Almeida: Review

On September 12, 2001May 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

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.

Print Media Reviews The Seagull

The Seagull at the National Theatre – Review

On July 9, 1994May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

It is the women who dominate this show

By Irving Wardle | July 9 ,1994 | The independent

Besides allowing Dame Judi Dench to add another trophy to her collection of Chekhov leads, John Caird’s production of The Seagull has the pretext of restoring a picture frame to the open stage; or, rather, four picture frames, which descend one by one on John Gunter’s lakeside perspective, so that by the end you are looking through the accumulated settings of the whole play. The apparent aim of this romantically cumbersome design, supported by Dominic Muldowney’s wistful valses oubliees, is to break the embargo on Chekhovian ‘atmosphere’. The effect is contradicted once the opening image of the ghostly company drifting under moonlit birch trees gives way to the play itself, performed with full egoistic drive in a colloquially muscular version by Pam Gems.

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An all-star Cast Perform at the Donmar

Anton Chekhov in a new version by David Hare

Helen McCrory Navigates a Full Spectrum of Emotion

Platonov

It is the women who dominate this show