Ivanov.

"The perfect 10s for [Kenneth] Branagh's performance in the title role of Ivanov, a Chekhov play adapted by Tom Stoppard, prompted BBC2's Newsnight to ask whether Britain was entering a new golden age of theatre," reports David Smith. "Ivanov is the first show in a year-long season that the Donmar Warehouse is bringing to the Wyndham's Theatre, featuring Dame Judi Dench, Sir Derek Jacobi and Jude Law, who will play Hamlet under Branagh's direction. Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes are headlining at the National Theatre, Michael Gambon and David Walliams are about to open in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, and the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet, with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, is such a hot ticket that when London booking opened the box office was taking 2,000 calls every second."

"This is a turning point for London theatre," agrees Susannah Clapp. "Ivanov was a canny choice of Michael Grandage's, the Donmar's artistic director.... It is one of the best ever dramatic portrayals of depression.... It's one brilliance of Tom Stoppard's light-on-its feet, ingenious but not too pleased with itself translation that Ivanov's condition - the thing that has turned him from being an idealist to a no-hoping no-hoper - is everywhere described and nowhere diagnosed. It's a sack on the back, it's a sulk, it's a melancholy which women want to cure. The mystery becomes part of its torment; it is constantly escaping, changing shape, never treatable."

Also in the Observer, Tim Adams talks with Stoppard about Russians and Czechs.

"Ivanov, the earliest play by Chekhov to receive a production in Russia, is not often revived these days," writes Paul Taylor. "But the title role - of a landowner in the mother of all mid-life crises - is notable in this country for the way it has lured two British stars back from the screen to their illustrious starting point, the stage. A decade ago, Ralph Fiennes played the part for Jonathan Kent at the Almeida. And now, giving a performance of extraordinary perceptiveness and human breadth, Kenneth Branagh has an almighty crack at Ivanov.... This is great acting, no question."

Also in the Independent, Kate Bassett: "Tom Stoppard's new English version is vivacious. Cheeky modern colloquialisms rub along with the fin-de-siècle Russian setting.... Branagh does not persuasively convey the numb lethargy of depression... Nonetheless, his flashes of irritability and tender warmth are startling."

Branagh brings "articulate melancholy to Tom Stoppard's punchy, witty, if overfree translation," writes Benedict Nightingale in the London Times. "Michael Grandage bolsters his reputation as an actor's director by getting fine performances from the (variously) ebullient, malicious and wanly affable topers played by Lorcan Cranitch, Malcolm Sinclair and Kevin McNally, but he's equally successful at evoking a tiny, mean-spirited world where the diversions are playing cards, exchanging scandal and making antiSemitic remarks. And the sum effect is so glumly comic you're left wondering how Ivanov could ever have been dismissed as minor Chekhov."

Ivanov has long been regarded "as the runt in the litter compared with the four great plays of Chekhov's maturity," notes Charles Spencer in the Telegraph. "Even Michael Frayn, who has probably forgotten more about Chekhov than most people will ever know, has described the play as 'possibly the most lowering thing Chekhov ever wrote.'... Kenneth Branagh is in magnificent form.... His cruelty, his weariness and his self-disgust are all unsparingly caught and yet Branagh also suggests the blighted beauty in the character that makes two women love him."

Posted by dwhudson at September 21, 2008 7:11 AM