Chekhov
Hot Milk review - a mother of a problemFriday, 04 July 2025
Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama". Strictly speaking, it's a psychoanalytic one – a clue-sprinkled case study, involving talk therapy, of a woman... Read more... |
The Brightening Air, Old Vic review - Chekhov jostles Conor McPherson in writer-director's latestSaturday, 17 May 2025
It's one thing to be indebted to a playwright, as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter have been at different times to Beckett, or Sondheim's latest musical is to Sartre. But Conor McPherson's The Brightening Air – the title itself is derived from Yeats... Read more... |
Three Sisters, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - Chekhov's anatomy lesson on the human conditionFriday, 14 February 2025
Russia.It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to our own, yet so very different. You feel it in Moscow, where I spent a week exactly 40 years ago. Like London, it is a vast city,... Read more... |
Uncle Vanya, Orange Tree Theatre review - Chekhov served up choiceMonday, 11 March 2024
"We all live here in peace and friendship," notes Telegin (David Ahmad), otherwise known as Waffles, early in Uncle Vanya, to which one is tempted to respond, "yeah, right."As casually bruising a play as I know, Chekhov's wounding yet also brutally... Read more... |
Drive My Car review - talk therapy on the roadSaturday, 20 November 2021
In the first 35 minutes of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s three-hour Drive My Car, which the Japanese director adapted with Oe Takamasa from a story in Murakami Haruku’s Men Without Women collection, the successful actor Kafuku Yūsuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi)... Read more... |
The Cherry Orchard, Windsor Theatre Royal review - Tolstoy meets Mrs Two SoupsSaturday, 16 October 2021
The cherry orchard in Anton Chekhov’s eponymous play is a classic MacGuffin, its existence a reason to stir the sorts of resentments, fancies and identity causes that start wars and revolutions. The orchard’s beautiful, and that’s all – a cultivated... Read more... |
George Saunders: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain review – Russian lessons in literature and lifeWednesday, 06 January 2021
Before he published fiction, George Saunders trained as an engineer and wrote technical reports. The Booker-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, and four volumes of short stories, still has a telling fondness for precisely-scaled kits, blueprints... Read more... |
Uncle Vanya, Harold Pinter Theatre review - a superlative company achievementFriday, 24 January 2020
Uncle Vanya must surely be the closest, the most essential of Chekhov’s plays, its cast – just four main players who are caught up in the drama's fraught emotional action, and four who are essentially supporting – a concentrated unit even by the... Read more... |
Best of 2019: TheatreSaturday, 28 December 2019
Political dysfunction and societal distress led many amongst us to the brink this year, so where better than the theatre to find succour if not always solace in the abundantly thoughtful offerings of a creative community as often as not working at... Read more... |
Three Sisters, National Theatre review - Chekhov in time of warWednesday, 11 December 2019
Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters plays Chekhov in the shadow of war, specifically the Nigerian-Biafran secessionist conflict of the late 1960s which so bitterly divided that newly independent nation. It’s a bold move that adds decided new relevance... Read more... |
Three Sisters, Maly Drama Theatre, Vaudeville Theatre review - a Chekhov of luminous clarityThursday, 20 June 2019
Lev Dodin has been artistic director of the famed Maly Drama Theatre for some three and a half decades now, over which time the St Petersburg company has earned itself the highest of international reputations. London audiences have been fortunate to... Read more... |
DVD: The House by the SeaMonday, 22 April 2019
Robert Guediguian has spoken of the influence of Chekhov on The House by the Sea (Le Villa), and the shadow of the Russian dramatist, particularly The Cherry Orchard, can certainly be felt in the French director’s latest film, his 20th in a career... Read more... |
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