Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
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by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Morwyn Brebner,
directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
June 24-September 24, 2006
"Shouting Among the Russians"
The lunchtime show at this year’s Shaw Festival, “Love Among the Russians”, is comprised of two early farces by Anton Chekhov that he called “vaudevilles”--“The Bear” (1888) and “The Proposal” (1889). Morwyn Brebner has adapted the two and Eda Holmes has directed them as if they had nothing to do with any of Chekhov’s other works. As a result both become non-stop shouting matches with more in common with the Three Stooges or Daffy Duck than with “The Three Sisters” or “The Seagull”.
The better known of the two is “The Bear” in which the widow Elena has been mourning the death of her promiscuous husband for a year. Her aged servant Luka urges her to give up her seclusion, but Elena insists that she will remain faithful to her husband even if he never did to her. Into her life steps the misogynist lieutenant Grigory Stepanovich Smirnov, who demands that Elena pay him the money her husband owed him or he will go bankrupt and will not leave until she does so.
The point of this skit is to see how two opposites attract. Smirnov, the “bear” of the title, is rough and loutish while Elena is over-insistent on maintaining propriety. What we should see is that Elena doth protest too much in her mourning and that her resistance to Smirnov is exactly what he likes in a woman. Unfortunately, Holmes pays little heed to the dynamics of the text. As soon as she has Elena put on perfume before Smirnov’s first entrance we know Holmes plans to throw Chekhov’s characterization out the window. She is more interested in physically choreographing their battle around the Court House stage, including pointlessly collapsing furniture, than in exploring the subtler comedy of the characters’ battle within themselves between the hatred they outwardly profess and the attraction they start to feel in spite of themselves. At no time does she direct Luka to act like the 85-year-old he says he is and so neglects the physical humour possible with this figure and misses one of the comic highlights of the play when Elena commands that Luka to throw out the physically stronger Smirnov.
In 2002 the Soulpepper Theatre Company of Toronto presented “The Bear” in a so-so adaptation by Jason Sherman directed by Albert Schultz. Earlier this year Touchmark Theatre of Guelph presented the play in Irishman Brian Friel’s excellent adaptation directed by Douglas Beattie. Of these three Eda Holmes’s approach is the most superficial, turning Chekhov’s subtle interplay of characters into a blazing shouting match. In contrast, Beattie’s approach that explored the psychological comedy of the characters’ conscious and unconscious self-deception was more humorous and more intellectually satisfying. It also served to show how Chekhov’s vaudevilles, farcical though they may be, still look forward to the Russian master’s later work. After all, if you are going to stage Chekhov’s vaudevilles, why willfully ignore, as Holmes does, their context in the writer’s work?
“The Proposal” is a fitting companion to “The Bear” since it presents a congruent but opposite situation. Here the nerdy Ivan Vasylievich Lomov has come to propose to the unsophisticated Natalya Stepanova and indeed has the approval of her father Stepan Stepanovich Chubukov. The difficulty is that whenever Natalya and Ivan get into conversation their disagreements about the most minor questions--who owns what land, whose dog is better--escalate into major arguments from which neither will back down. Holmes’s broad approach works better in this piece than in “The Bear”, but it’s not hard to see that greater subtlety would be even more successful. It would be much funnier and more logical if she allowed the “loving” couple’s arguments to escalate gradually and with some pretense of unwillingness rather than suddenly to have them explode. By staging this play as another shouting match, Holmes makes no attempt to create any difference in tone or modulation between the two works, which would at least provide a sense of variety.
In this, Holmes is not helped at all by Morwyn Brebner’s perfectly dreadful adaptation from Anastasia Rossinsky’s literal Russian translation. Brebner totally ignores all the carefully coded levels of politeness and diction found in the texts, and whose transgression makes the plays so funny. Instead, she has all the characters in both plays, young or old, male or female, express themselves in exactly the same modern-day teenspeak. “Roly is so unbetter than Poly”, Natalya says to Ivan at one point about their dogs. This anachronistic diction turns out to be Brebner’s sole source of humour, since she telegraphs characters’ feelings that Chekhov more subtly and gradually reveals. Just as Rick Miller can make Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” funny by playing all the roles in the voices of the Simpsons, so any play can be made “funny” by translating it into inappropriate diction.
Since the actors have been directed to play caricatures not characters, none can be judged according to nuance or insight. In “The Bear”, Blair Williams speaks loudly and makes broad gestures but he still comes off more as dashing than boorish as Smirnov ought to be. Diana Donnelly is petulant as Elena but never convincing. Her mourning seems a sham from the beginning and her opposition to Smirnov plays like flirting even when it shouldn’t. Williams Vickers could make a good Luka, but as mentioned above, he never acts as ancient as he says he is. In “The Proposal” Vickers plays the father Chubukov no differently than he did Luka. Diana Donnelly is much more at home in the role of the uncultured Natalya, but Martin Happer is the one actor who actually succeeds in making the hopelessly geeky Ivan funny because of his character’s personality not the shtick attached to it.
Andrew Bunker, Krista Colosimo and Elodie Gillett, billed as “Musical Russians” add to the vaudeville atmosphere of the show by singing a very silly song “Don’t Fall in Love” written by Brebner, Paul Sportelli and Jay Turvey as a prelude, interlude and finale to the two plays. As befits the production, William Schmuck’s costumes play on clichéd notions of Russian dress.
If any of N-o-t-L’s hoards of ice cream cone-licking pedestrians decide to commit to only one show on the Shaw playbill, “Love Among the Russians” will likely please them as a chance to sit in an air-conditioned room for an hour watching people acting goofy. For frequent theatre-goers, however, Brebner’s adaptation is a gross dumbing down of the text and Holmes’s hurried direction ensures that the show plays as much like a live-action cartoon as possible. These may be farces by Chekhov, but there is much more in them than are dreamt of in Brebner’s or Holmes’s philosophy.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Blair Williams and Diana Donnelly in The Bear. Diana Donnelly and Martin Happer in The Proposal. ©David Cooper.
2006-09-02
Love Among the Russians