Brighton Fringe 2026
Chekhovian
Sian Webber
Genre: Adaptation, classical, Comedic, Costume
Venue: The Lantern Theatre, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Chekhov’s letters (to and from), interleave excerpts from Chekhov’s four mature plays, six scenes in all, with five actors. Webber directs Chekhovian at the Lantern Theatre, Brighton at the Lantern main Studio till May 3.
See it for the Chekhov, and come away forgetting for the most part these are students. They’re already Chekhovian.
Review
A small group of young London day-trippers are baffled by the play they’ve elected to see at Brighton’s Lantern on the spur of the moment. It isn’t an apocalypse. That was upstairs. It was an apotheosis downstairs. They were seeing the wrong play. How Chekhovian that is, how he’d have relished turning that into a story, I told them later: as they began to appreciate what they’d lighted on. And created by Sian Webber for her Year 2 Group at ACT, you should too. I soon forgot anything to do with Year 2. Chekhov’s letters (to and from), interleave excerpts from Chekhov’s four mature plays, six scenes in all, with five actors. Webber directs Chekhovian at the Lantern Theatre, Brighton at the Lantern main Studio till May 3.
To those of us who welcome it Chekhovian is a bittersweet feeling. Gentle ironies, tragi-comedic farces of human nature; and last night at least five more souls were exposed to it. What Webber’s maanged so skilfully is to craft and direct a seamless portfolio of Chekhov’s life and genius as playwright. What stands out though are those scenes.
Letters
We start with James Pattenden’s Chekhov, whom he inhabits throughout: a letter from 1897 when he gives up his medical practice on medical advice and hears from his sister just how Stanislavsky’s new Moscow Arts Theatre had tackled his first mature paly The Seagull (more accurately Lake Gull), which just the previous year had flopped. Later we revert to a cockier young Chekhov brooding on immortality with a swagger, back in 1887, when he was celebrated as a short story writer. Throughout he spars with his (initially future) wife actress Olga Knipper (Lilith Leonard), who originated several roles (here reproduced by Leonard). Leonard is consummate, and though mostly confined to being Chekhov, Pattenden in his fresh approach comes into his own later.
The Seagull (1896)
Leonard plays the imperious actress mother Arkadina with consummate petulance in Act 1, somehow undermining her son’s tiny playlet, rendered by Nina (Sophie Delevine) who with Leonard creates some of the best theatre here. In another scene from Act 2 Nina falls for the established second-rank writer Trigorin (Pattenden), already Arkadian’s lover, but here lamenting his obsession and failure. Delevine moved exquisitely round the self-pitying writer, after Gabriel Oprea, who’ll be more prominent later, drops a dead gull at her feet (a good model by the way). Sophie Harding, who has least to do in this compilation, briefly plays Arkadina’s ruminant brother Sorin, but has a fine outburst later.
Uncle Vanya (1887/1898)
Crafted from his early The Wood Demon, it’s now an incomparably richer play and brings out perhaps the most affecting acting of the evening. there’s a brief cameo from Pattenden as the eponymous character but the scene in Act 2 between Yelena (Leonard) the young wife of Sonya father and Sonya (Delevine) is heart-stopping. Moving from reconciliation at mutual confusions, they confes their feelings, but not all. Both are in love with Doctor Astrov, yet Yelena does the decent thing and says she’ll try to find out his feelings towards “plain” Sonya. This is exquisite acting, and time stands still with these two actors.
It doesn’t slacken either in the Act 3 excerpt when Astrov himself (Oprea) emerges. Oprea observes all the inflections of a deeply intelligent even visionary man who despite himself has feelings for Yelena; and only fraternal ones for Sonya whom he confesses most things to. He’d been blind. Oprea proves himself worthy to stand with both actors and carries the spell forward. There’s a scene and for another character an awkward revelation.
Three Sisters (1901)
A play leaving a sour taste perhaps, there’s (like The Cherry Orchard) just one scene. Three sisters of a dead general are yoked to the fortunes of hopeless, outgunned cuckolded brother Andrey. He’s abject and realises his vulgar and faithless wife has taken control of the family home and expropriated his sisters and their nanny. Act Three – the single excerpt from the paly – sees the results of a fire the famiy is trying to relieve the victims of. As Koolygin, the eldest Olga’s brother-in-law, Pattenden’s exemplary brief performance shows how the men here prove full of accidie and are mostly ineffectual; whilst the women have agency: either as schemer or members of a leisured but now hard-working class.
Leonard as Olga the schoolteacher is unable to confront vicious Natasha (Delevine) who starts ordering the family servants and in particular the helpless 80-year-old faithful nanny (Sophie Harding, a model of cowled despair). The ascendancy of some elements of the class Chekhov himself came from – ex-serfs, working and lower-middle class – is cause for wry ambivalence here. No class is exempt with Chekhov, yet all are vulnerable. Again Leonard and Delevine impress in this painful, brutal scene around relief of victims of a fire that destroys a street. One which Natasha has little time for. Delevine again moving from ardent, trusting Sonia to Natasha showcases a range of emotions. And from Yelena’s pained sense of her own beauty she shrinks to prematurely careworn and here an overly genteel Olga: unable to stand up for herself and denounce what she knows.
The Cherry Orchard (1904)
In the excerpt from Act 2, Pattenden appears with a banjo after another round of letters as Yedihodov a young and rather forlorn clerk: it’s another amusing prelude to another one, where Harding explodes as the eccentric German governess Charlotta, reciting her life. It’s often done quirkily (a Yuong Vic production in 2014 had her memorably stride out naked with a hat). Here Harding plays Charlotta as seething yet not centred as to what she might seethe about. It’s a viable Charlotta, who is distinctly odd.
The burden falls (like the scene in Uncle Vanya) between Leonard and Oprea, and is almost as pained. Leonard’s Dunyasha, a maid who’s been seduced by Yasha (another ambitious but brutal person from the working class). The crossed ambitions of both play a counterpoint you know is awry. Yasha wants to go with the family to Paris, and Dunyasha will be left behind, he thinks, but doesn’t say. In his slouch cap Oprea looks almost like Chekhov himself, but here inflects ambivalence: a man playing cards deadpan.
Leonard closes the tableaux a Knipper with the last scenes enacted between her and Pattenden’s Chekhov. His hat is bracketed poignantly on the stand Pattenden uses.
The music isn’t Russian, bar one snatch of a folk-setting, but the briefest snatches of Johann Strauss II, Chopin and more pervasively Schumann’s Kinderscenen. The latter, with its movement “Going to Sleep” is timed with aching poignancy here. Erin Burbridge delivered lighting and effects seamlessly, and the costumes were on-point and wittily deployed, especially hats.
As a showcase of Chekhov, and an introduction to him, this could hardly be bettered. If the burden falls on three exemplary actors, who’d be at hoe anywhere one feels, all five acquit themselves with aplomb. Far more than bite-size Chekhov, there’s the core of his ambivalent, Janus-facing genius here: the glow of one of the very greatest dramatists turned bright here. See it for the Chekhov, and come away forgetting for the most part these are students. They’re already Chekhovian.
