IvanovThe Black Swan of Trespass / Stalking Matilda ~ theatre notes

Monday, August 15, 2005

Ivanov

Ivanov by Anton Chekhov, translated by Natalia Axenova. Directed by Ariette Taylor, deisgned by Adrienne Chisholm, lighting by Philip Lethlean. With Paul English, Helen Morse, Alex Menglet, Malcolm Robertson, Margaret Mills, Chloe Armstrong, Dan Spielman, Jane Nolan, Bob Hornery, Stewart Morrit, Monica Maughan, Laurie Bishop, Jonathan Taylor. At Fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, City, until August 31.

Ivanov's famously disastrous premiere, in which the drunken actors forgot many of their lines, seems to have set its reputation as a minor Chekhov play. It's seldom staged, and is generally seen as merely a sketch of the genius better realised in masterpieces like The Seagull or The Cherry Orchard.

Watching this wonderful production, I couldn't help pondering the justice of this judgment: Ivanov seems rather more than a sidenote. It displays Chekhov's dispassionate accuracy of observation, a comedic eye for social detail as surgical as Jane Austen at her most caustic; and equally his instinct for the drama of human contradiction, if perhaps less nuanced than in his later plays. And beneath his art is already his fiercely moral refusal to judge weakness and folly, his sceptical idealism, his intense awareness of human possibility and finitude.

Chekhov himself said, in one of his many moments of irritation with the theatre: "In Ivanov it seems that I did not write what I wished. Remove it from the boards. I do not want to preach heresy on the stage. If the audience will leave the theatre with the conviction that Ivanovs are scoundrels and that Doctors Lvov are great men, then I’ll have to give up and fling my pen to the devil." But his frustration is as much with the limitations of theatre culture itself, as with his own abilities: " If the public does not understand 'iron in the blood'," he said, "then to the devil with it, i.e., with the blood in which there is no iron."

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Monday, August 08, 2005

The Black Swan of Trespass / Stalking Matilda

The Black Swan of Trespass by Lally Katz and Chris Kohn. Directed by Chris Kohn, with Jacklyn Bassanelli, Christopher Brown, Gavan O'Leary, Katie Keady and Chris Kohn (musician). Stuck Pigs Squealing at The Tower Theatre, Malthouse, until August 7. Stalking Matilda by Tee O'Neill. Directed by Chris Bendall, with Jude Beaumont, Irene Dios, Odette Joannidis, Ron Jordan, Toby Newton and Jeremy Stanford, Theatre@Risk at Theatreworks, St Kilda, until August 21.

People speak easily about the poetry of theatre, as if it were self evident, as if it were merely an ornament available to those who might choose to employ it. But poetry is not an easy thing. It is the pith and passion of plays, the molten spine of them; it is the profundity that is summoned by the carnality of language, the mystery of the corporeal and the mortal: this particular body in this specific time, speaking what cannot be repeated.

The Black Swan of Trespass and Stalking Matilda are very different plays; but both have been described as "poetic". It must be said that the poetry of theatre differs, markedly and importantly, from poems: but it is also related, in ways which are not necessarily obvious but which remain profound. Predictably I suppose, given my own predelictions, what struck me in both productions was a conviction that theatre practitioners would benefit from a better understanding of poetry.



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