FringeReview UK 2024
In and Out of Chekhov’s Shorts
Dragonboy Productions
Genre: Adaptation, Classical and Shakespeare, Comedy, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Southwark Playhouse Large Studio, Borough
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
A five-strong musical gypsy band rove Russia performing five Chekhov short stories. Eliot Giuralrocca’s adaptation editing and directing In and Out of Chekhov’s Shorts delivers the earthiest of Chekhovian tangs at the Southwark Borough Large for the briefest of revivals.
Outstanding. It reframes Chekhov, renders his stories as cousins not siblings of his plays, The Bear and other early shorts excepted. And in a fluidity of new connections renders them kin. After this, there’s no other way to tell Chekhov dramatically that he’s not already nailed down in a play himself. Chekhov would have loved it.
Written & Directed by Eliot Giuralrocca, Composer Tom Neill, Set and Costume Designer and Build Victoria Spearing, Lighting Designer/TSM Claire Childs, Production Design Samantha Warner
Till March 23rd
Review
A five-strong musical gypsy band rove Russia performing five Chekhov short stories. Eliot Giuralrocca’s adaptation editing and directing In and Out of Chekhov’s Shorts delivers the earthiest of Chekhovian tangs at the Southwark Borough Large for the briefest of revivals.
This tour really ought to continue though. It’s outstanding and revelatory. Five stories, refracted through music and Victoria Spearing’s superbly stylised portable set. A piano with a dust sheet hiding its function, two barrels and a plank for a seat, a range of brilliantly stylised props.
But it’s the actors who become the biggest ones, and this ensemble are in complete synch in prop-and-prat-falls: it’s theatrical platinum. A husband in memory pops up in a picture frame, a black-cloth-beheaded actor becomes an inkstand, or swivels as a door with a shop-bell on it.
Everything’s as kinetic, engrossing visually and aurally. Nothing of Chekhovian ennui here: it’s like fire seen through a vodka bottle. Claire Childs’ lighting suggests that too, sometimes red, a glowing book at one point. And Dragonboy Productions interact, especially in the Large’s up-close space: first rows beware.
Chekhov’s inherently dramatic tragi-comic stories, often acclaimed the world’s finest, aren’t his plays. They’re different in temper, kind, even class: more peasants and poor people throng them. There’s primary colours and broader comedy. They’re more intimate, telegraphic, more story, less nuanced dialogue and more twist: uniquely poised on the cusp of change.
In unfulfilled lives, thwarted women and men glimpse – through brief joy in adultery and love-affairs, drink – a larger, possible being.
So forget Trevor Nunn’s magnificent Uncle Vanya currently at the Orange Tree. If anything, Andrew Scott’s Vanya enjoys kinship here. Five unrelated stories connected in one arc from youth to experience through premature cynicism. And one story is masquerading.
The Chemist’s Wife features Elizabeth Snegir, a young wife married to a man she doesn’t love: “God how unhappy I am, and nobody knows” is a Chekhov signature tune. Soon an army doctor Graeme Dalling, and his even more raffish companion Obtyosov (Chris Agha) who’ve noticed how attractive the young woman is, make an excuse to enter the shop whilst the chemist sleeps. Soon they’re flirting and singing, consuming the purchased drink with her. But can it last?
It’s quietly heartbreaking. The moment the young wife, with the husband woken, lets fly a note out of the window immediately taken up is one of those breathtaking pieces of theatre: a love note? It is, but not from her, and it is, but it isn’t.
We’re into the second story, At a Summer Villa, and Giuralrocca’s cleverly reworked tiny details to suggest a kind of DNA through the tales if the same people experience things in a parallel universe or different time. It’s subtle too, doesn’t need taking literally.
Subtlety isn’t the hallmark in this tale though, but hilarious guile. Verity Bajoria as the irritated eight-years-wife of Dalling’s Pavel Ivanitch might know more than she lets on when he receives a mysterious note, perhaps from that same young woman in a blue beret (taken from the next story), trilling a flute. Snegir again. But Pavel’s brother-in-law Mitya (Agha) turns up to the tryst too. The denouement’s abruptly comic.
The cores of Giuralrocca’s work though are the third story and fifth piece, actually a short play. The Lady with a Little Dog is split over the interval, relating the attraction and lazy seduction by Giuralrocca’s Gurov, pushing 40, of Sengir’s 22-year-old Anna Sergeyevna. It becomes significantly more. After their brief affair Gurov follows her to her home town.
It’s beautifully realised between the actors, Snegir’s ardent impulsiveness and drawing-back, Giuralrocca’s easy seduction crumbling in the face of real passion, as each contemplates what to do about their unhappy marriages.
An Avenger involves most of all Dalling’s shopkeeper desperately trying to sell cuckolded husband Sigaev (Agha) the right pistol to kill his wife and her lover – Snegir and Giuralrocca who obligingly repeat their sexual excesses on rewind every time he contemplates who to kill. And the pistols? They’re all bound twigs.
Ultimately though it’s Dalling’s magnificent frustration trying to push Agha to the supreme Smith and Wesson and the denouement, that’s the killer here. Dalling’s reserves of comedic energy and micro-inflection seem boundless.
The Bear, a short play almost as long as The Lady, doesn’t need much adapting, and is often played (it’s even a one-act 1967 opera by Walton). Despite this it has more in common with the stories and is quite early.
Barjora’s a young widow Elena Popova, who refuses to see anyone after her faithless husband’s death. But Giuralrocca’s Smirnov’s arrived with a 1200 rouble IOU from her husband she must pay back, and it ends with pistols (cue the Smith and Wesson repeater joke). The rest of the cast (Agha’s servant Luka) are brought in, ordered to feed the horses another bag of oats, or none at all. And Smirnov has the oats.
Tom Neill’s musical adaptations mean actors play double or triple instruments over the five stories, Snegir is a fine flautist, accordion-player, and consummate pianist, in the shrouded piano that Bajoria mostly plays with thrilling octaves (more on that later too), when not whirling on the violin or guitar. There’s Dalling’s folksy clarinet too.
Neill’s tangy adaptations take from several folk sources including the famous ‘Kalinka’, some Pushkin settings and rare Glinka. But most of all in The Lady and the Little Dog there’s Aleksandrovina Kashperova (1872-1940) Stravinsky’s teacher whose late-romantic works are being rediscovered: her Piano Trio and two Cello Sonatas are regularly played. Here there’s her Piano Suite In Nature’s Realm refracted mainly through piano, but echoed hauntingly elsewhere.
Dalling’s the most protean of the ensemble, given roles where he shapeshifts and riffs on exaggerated despair or exasperation: but all are superb. That’s whether it’s Barjora’s humorous realism and self-defeating fury at her own desire; Agha’s stentorian roars the most physically imposing and yet blindsided; the pathos yet burning desire for something better in Snegir who yet brings twirls of humour; or writer/director Giuralrocca and his reflective characters measured by how far they question their own cynicism.
This is outstanding. It reframes Chekhov, renders his stories as cousins not siblings of his plays, The Bear and other early shorts excepted. And in a fluidity of new connections renders them kin. After this, there’s no other way to tell Chekhov dramatically that he’s not already nailed down in a play himself. Chekhov would have loved it.
