A comical misfortune
Ivanov is the first play by Chekhov I’ve seen, although I have read some of his short stories. With titles like ‘A Misfortune’ and ‘She Left Him’, it’s fair to say these are not the cheeriest of tales. There is one innocuous sounding story included in my small collection, ‘At the Mill’, but we all know what happens at the mill - trouble.
Somehow the lovely Autumn managed to land some of the very hard-to-come-by tickets for a very reasonable ten quid a pop. This might have accounted our seats at the very top of the balcony, where people with standing tickets peeped over our shoulders from the walkway.
The play begins just outside Nikolai Ivanov’s farm house. Kenneth Branagh plays the hero who’s trying to read a book when Borkin, the estate manager and a larky chancer, creeps up behind him and lets off his gun. Ha! Ivanov is not amused. This soon becomes the pattern for much of the play. He’s plagued by layabouts who slide through life on charm, while he cracks up.
The Count, Ivanov’s tall, louche uncle is another of these characters who doesn’t really understand or sympathize with all his moping. The uncle is poor, despite his title, and apparently whiles away the hours over tea and chitchat with Ivanov’s wife. Anna, played by a suitably consumptive and increasingly disillusioned Gina McKee, comes from a wealthy Jewish family who’ve disowned her for marrying a gentile.
These slightly lost characters are believable but also very amusing. The play incongruously balances tragedy with comedy. As this production is adapted by Tom Stoppard I wondered if it was being played for laughs. It turns out Chekhov was commissioned to write a comedy and this what he came up with. However, as the play progresses and we see the full horror of Ivanov’s state of mind, it’s not much fun.
Kenneth Branagh conveys his character’s depression deftly, without swamping the stage. Shuffling around, you could almost miss him. Although Ivanov has a pile of debt and has fallen out of love with his wife, this don’t seem to lie at the root for this gloom. He’s simply depressed. The play is almost a study of mental illness rather than an examination of an iniquitous society that drives one to despair. Unlike Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ivanov believes things could still turn out alright if only he could pull himself together.
This doesn’t sound very exciting, but the laughs don’t stop. In one later scene three or four characters are all sobbing, leaving the audience in hoots. Even as ideals are compromised, debts pile ever higher and hope vanishes it’s infected with absurdity, and that can be pretty funny.
Tags: Chekhov, Ivanov, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Stoppard