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by Anton Chekhov / Susan Coyne & Jason Sherman, directed by Albert Schultz, Daniel Brooks, Joseph Ziegler & Leah Cherniak

Soulpepper Theatre Company, du Maurier Theatre, Toronto

September 9-October 2, 2002

"A Zesty Five-Course Meal"

Soulpepper's final offering of 2002 is an evening of four of Anton Chekhov's short one-act plays preceded by the world première of a play about Chekhov.  If the idea of seeing five plays in two and a half hours seems daunting, it isn't.  Think of it as a five-course tasting menu.  Soulpepper Artistic Director Albert Schultz has paired the Chekhov plays with some of Canada's top playwrights whose savoury colloquial adaptations make them seem new.  The plays have been carefully chosen and the program carefully arranged to make us see the common themes and images that link one piece to the next making for a satisfying evening that is much more than the sum of its parts.

The appetizer is "The Old Business" by Susan Coyne and Jason Sherman directed by Leah Cherniak.  Though the weakest play of the five, it is an excellent preface to the other four.  It concerns Chekhov himself on the disastrous opening night in 1896 of his first full-length play seen by the public, "The Seagull", marking a break with the series of vaudevilles that had made him so popular.  That night's disaster would later turn to triumph and the seagull would be adopted as the symbol of the Moscow Arts Theatre.  But at the moment we meet Chekhov, his supporter Alexei Suvorin and his leading lady Lika, each is filled with anger and resentment prompted by the first night audience's negative reaction.

Chekhov (Diego Matamoros) has fled the theatre and vows never to write another play.  He will turn to the country to do farming and doctoring, something useful in the few remaining years of his life.  The title is what Chekhov calls the tuberculosis he knows will kill him.  Meanwhile Suvorin (Victor Ertmanis) and later the Lika (Nicole Underhay) berate Chekhov for using their personal tragedies as material in the play. 

Coyne and Sherman try for the blending of humour and pathos in Chekhov's own work but only succeed in shifting from one to the other.  While the relation between Chekhov and Suvorin is believable, that between Chekhov and Lika, not to mention her entrance through the window, is not.  Matamoros is the most successful of the three at communicating complex emotions, here a mix of pride, self-doubt and anger at himself and at those who had already prejudged his play.

After this introduction we move on to four examples of the vaudevilles that Chekhov would cease writing after the "The Seagull" had gone on to success.  The first of these is "The Dangers of Tobacco" (1886) translated by Dan Healey, adapted by Michael Healey and directed by Albert Schultz.  We meet a severely henpecked husband (Joseph Ziegler) whose wife has put him up to giving a lecture on the title topic.  In this version of the actor's nightmare, the poor man admits he knows nothing on the topic and in an attempt to explain his awkward position bemoans a life wasted in 33 years of marriage to a woman who makes his every moment miserable.  Ziegler makes the man's befuddlement and not-so-hidden resentment hilarious.  Schultz makes much of the fact that, as in "The Maids", the audience is seated on opposite sides of the stage compounding the man's difficulty in where to direct his address.

After this lecture by a hesitant speaker, we move to an outright tirade in

"The Tragic Role" (1890) adapted by Adam Pettle and directed by Daniel Brooks.  A man (Diego Matamoros) comes to visit his friend in town (Joseph Ziegler) to borrow a revolver since he can no longer stand the "pleasures" of cottage life.  What with mosquitoes and tenors he gets no sleep and during the day everyone gives him lengthy lists of errands they want him to do while he is in town.  This is the slightest of the four Chekhovs, rather like an O. Henry short story in the form of a play, but Matamoros' intensity as a performer makes it highly entertaining.  Brooks's minimalist style, holding speaker and listener in a static pose in a small pool of light, relates Chekhov forward to the Theatre of the Absurd.    

After intermission we encounter the best-known of Chekhov's playlets, "The Bear" (1888), adapted by Jason Sherman.  Albert Schultz  has directed this play in a more exaggerated style than the others that is well suited to its farcical nature.  After glorious strains of Mussorgsky, the lights go up to find Martha Burns a young widow sitting in the pose of "Whistler's Mother".  To demonstrate what true love is the widow has vowed to shut herself up in her house to mourn her dead husband (even though he was a cad) until the end of her days.  Into her life bursts a soldier (Oliver Becker), a friend of her husband and the "bear" of the title, demanding immediate repayment of a loan.  An elderly servant (William Webster) is too timid to remove him.  The more adamant the widow becomes the more boorish the soldier becomes.  Their dispute escalates until the widow proposes a duel to settle the matter.  But the heat of the exchange of threats and insults seems to provoke another sort of heat as the two find themselves attracted to each other against their wills.  Schultz and his cast have expertly managed the arc of the action rising steadily from the dead calm of the beginning to the riotous emotional confusion at the end.

In complete contrast, the final piece takes us back to the world of the theatre in a melancholy vignette about an aged actor.  This is "Swan Song" (1888) adapted by David French and directed by Joseph Ziegler.  The actor (William Webster) has passed out from drink and wakes up to find himself on the empty stage after everyone has gone home.  Like so many characters in Chekhov he makes use of the occasion to wallow in self-pity, but here it is unleavened by comedy.  It so happens that the prompter (Oliver Dennis), who unbeknownst to the management, sleeps in a dressing room each night, comes upon the actor.  His presence causes the actor to reflect on his greatest roles launching into scenes, with his help, from "King Lear", "Hamlet" and "Macbeth".  Even as Shakespeare's words reinvigorate him, we see that he has no life outside the illusion of the theatre and even there the time he "struts and frets his hour upon the stage" is reaching its end. 

In a more sombre form "Swan Song" picks up the undercurrent that runs through all five plays of lives wasted, lost youth mourned and everyday life impossible to bear.  Webster and Dennis are excellent.  Unlike Jeannette Lambermont's production at Stratford in 1990, Ziegler ensures that the tone never becomes mawkish.  Webster, unlike Stratford's Richard Curnock, gives the sense that even when wallowing this actor is still playing a part.        

Astrid Janson's set and costumes unify the plays with a sense of genteel tawdriness.  Paul Mathieson lights each play quite differently but there is an overall softness that seems to find it perfect conclusion in the lone candles in the darkness at the end of "Swan Song".

"Absolutely Chekhov" features only four of the ten of vaudevilles Chekhov wrote.  What a pleasure if Schultz could cook up another such well thought out, well executed evening as this.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (header) William Webster and Oliver Dennis in Swan Song; (top) Nicole Underhay and Diego Matamoros in The Old Business; (middle) Diego Matamoros in The Tragic Role. ©2002 Cylla von Tiedemann.