Young Chekhov Season

Chichester Festival Theatre, Oaklands Park, Monday, September 28, to Saturday, November 14

“THESE are not ‘masterpieces’, they are living pieces of theatre. The Young Chekhov season is the meeting of two great playwrights.”

Director Jonathan Kent admits the plan for the Young Chekhov season has been in slow gestation since the 1990s, when he first worked with playwright David Hare on his adaptations of the Russian’s first plays Platonov and Ivanov, at Islington’s Almeida Theatre.

“The plan was to complete the trilogy with The Seagull,” says Kent during an all-too brief respite from the ten-week rehearsal period.

“It had always been the idea to chart the arrival of a genius. Chekhov created contemporary theatre. To have the opportunity to do it here in Chichester was fantastic.”

Hare points to the critical re-evaluation of Ivanov following his 1997 translation as part of the reason for the project.

“No one had particularly taken the play seriously until then,” he says. “It had tended to be seen as a rather listless, melancholic, almost a parodic Russian drama.

“But Ralph Fiennes was brilliant, interpreting the role as a man fighting not to give in to melancholy, and people really started to take the play more seriously.

“This is the end of a 15 year dream for me, to be able to put all three plays together in one place.”

Kent is guiding a 22-strong cast through Ivanov, Platonov and The Seagull, which are being performed in rep at the Festival Theatre over the next two months, and all together in one day on Saturday, October 10, Saturday, October 17, Saturday, October 31, and Saturday, November 14.

Chekhov’s first play Platonov is a comedy about a man who is irresistible to women, forced to juggle various lovers. Ivanov follows a man pushed to the brink, as his estate fails, his wife falls ill and debts begin to overtake him.

And The Seagull sees idealistic young playwright Konstantin invite friends and family – including his actress mother Arkadina and her writer lover Trigorin - to see a theatre production he says will create a whole new form.

“It would be ambitious even for a national company,” says Hare of the Young Chekhov project.

“But I think that Jonathan Church [artistic director of Chichester Festival Theatre] who is leaving next year wanted to mark his work by doing something more ambitious.

“Someone interested in the growth of a genius can go and see Chekhov’s work develop from these earlier plays towards The Seagull. People love the idea of spending a whole day with Anton Chekhov.”

The Seagull marked the jumping off point in Chekhov’s dramatic career – heralding the trio of great works which would follow: Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, before the writer’s early death at the age of 44.

“For some people seeing these plays all in one day will be a fascinating thing,” says Kent. “It’s an insight into probably the greatest writer of the late 19th and early 20th century.

“It’s an extraordinary thing to watch a company of 22, and see characters reoccur in different guises through different plays.”

The three plays are quite different in their approach and tone – not least Platonov, the writer’s first play, which was only discovered and staged after his death.

“The original play is very disjointed with disparate scenes,” says Kent. “If you did it in one go it would take six hours.

“Hare has fashioned a play out of it which is wild and anarchic, a 20-year-old’s play, but a wonderful play.

“Some people know Ivanov, which is about middle-aged angst and despair, while The Seagull is the first flowering of his genius. The Seagull brings it all together in the elements of generational conflict and misunderstanding.

“The Seagull is the first 20th century play – even though it was written in 1897. The first two plays are interesting, but they don’t have quite the technical control that he had acquired by the time he wrote The Seagull.

“David is very respectful of the plays – he does no violence to their original spirit. There is no such thing as a true translation – any translation is an adaptation of a play.”

The plays are linked not only by Hare’s writing, but also the large cast, which includes Anna Chancellor, Samuel West, James McArdle, Peter Egan, Nina Sosanya, Joshua James, Olivia Vinall, and Jade Williams, many of whom take roles in two or three of the productions.

“You have to cast it in terms of the individual play,” says Kent. “Although I want people to play across all three productions you have to cast each play as well.

"You can find the relationships between the characters. Samuel West is playing Ivanov, and is also luxury casting as Trigorin [the successful writer and lover of Arkadina] in The Seagull.

“Olivia Vinall is a really remarkable young actress – she plays the three women in the plays who are viewed as a salvation by the characters.”

When it came to casting the fearsome Mme Arkadina in The Seagull Kent already knew who he wanted – having worked with Anna Chancellor in 2013’s Chichester production of Private Lives.

“I couldn’t think of anybody better to play it,” he says.

Chancellor will join a veritable who’s who of actors to play the grand dame mother of ambitious young writer Konstantin, who takes against her son's attractive muse Nina.

Previously the role has been played on stage by Dame Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Kristin Scott Thomas, Frances Barber and Dianne Wiest – a fact which hasn’t been lost on Chancellor.

“She is one of the great tragi-comic parts,” she says on a break from rehearsals.

“I saw Vanessa Redgrave play her when I was younger – although I probably wasn’t watching her to see how she did it back then!

“David’s adaptation has never been done before though, so that’s actually refreshing.”

When it came to preparing for the role Chancellor admits to a fascination with actresses in history.

“I have read a lot about Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernardt and the dancer Isadora Duncan,” she says.

“Actresses interest me – therefore one could say I’m interested in myself!”

What she finds fascinating in The Seagull is Chekhov’s own excavation of himself – after all the story is about a struggling playwright.

“For people within this world it is obviously going to have an extra draw,” she says.

“Actors love Chekhov – which can be a good or a bad thing. There is brilliant juxtaposition and structure. He’s an excellent composer of situations.”

She points to Chekhov’s history as a short story writer – something which came across as she watched the cast run through Platonov.

“Platonov sits together like a series of short stories,” says Chancellor, who is only appearing in The Seagull.

“When he wrote The Seagull it was in no way a classic play – it was like a dogme movie.

"He had such an inquiring mind – his characters talk about a new form in the play, but he’s actually doing it as he is writing. It’s very clever.

“The Seagull doesn’t look new to us now, but I would have loved to have seen it as a radically new thing.”

The Seagull had a chequered history, with Chekhov announcing his retirement from playwriting after its disastrous first run at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg.

It was only when theatrical revolutionary Stanislavski remade the production for the Moscow Art Theatre two years later that the play picked up critical acclaim.

“Stanislavski created a new kind of theatre,” says Kent.

A lot of this was down to the director’s technique – encouraging a naturalistic approach as oppose to the highly stylised way of performing common to the period’s theatre.

He even created a detailed directorial score of naturalistic movements to underline the play’s subtext.

What attracted Kent to the Young Chekhov project was the rawness of all three plays.

“These are a young man’s plays,” he says. “They are naked plays – before the veil of genius descended on Chekhov.

“He was famous as a short story writer, and there are elements of Gogol and a sense of the absurd in the plays, even in The Seagull. One forgets about these plays how funny they are.”

The trio are linked by Tom Pye’s set design – reflecting the importance place plays in Chekhov’s work.

“Doing the three plays in one day meant we couldn’t create a new space each time,” says Kent.

“The design metamorphoses into different scenes to match the demands of each play.

“Ivanov is mainly internal, while Platonov is almost entirely external. The Seagull moves between the two.

“Landscape in Chekhov is very important – it’s the vast landscape which diminishes the individual.”

Kent says the trilogy may prove to be his swansong with Chichester– having already directed some of the Festival Theatre’s biggest recent hits, including Sweeney Todd, Gypsy and Private Lives which all transferred to the West End.

“I have other things I have got to do,” he says.

“Jonathan Church and Alan Finch have been an extraordinary double act, and done enormous things for Chichester.

“I have been very pleased and gratified to be part of their regime over the last four or five years.”

Starts 7.30pm, matinees 2.30pm, tickets from £10. Call 01243 781312 or visit cft.org.uk

Additional interview by Joel Adams