Chekhov
Anxiety and agitation failing to translate into action as an exhausted and exhausting world faces an uncertain future – the contemporary relevance of The Cherry Orchard requires no special pleading. Retaining the characters and narrative trajectory of the play written by Anton Chekhov in 1903, Australian director Benedict Andrews employs music and contemporary diction in an ambitious production that takes the humour in Chekhov’s final play seriously.
... (read more)The setting is a country property somewhere in parched wheatbelt Australia. It is a four-hour drive from the city, with patchy phone reception. In Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, the character’s names remain the same, but we find Irina, Constantin, and Boris et al. in twenty-first-century Australia, dealing with mozzies and moaning about the internet, or lack thereof.
... (read more)In 1881, armed with the confidence of youth, the twenty-one-year-old Anton Pavlovich Chekhov fronted up to the Maly Theatre in Moscow, at that time one of the foremost theatres in the world, in order to present its leading actress, Maria Yermolova, with a copy of his recently written and probably first play. The great lady promptly returned the manuscript, whi ...