Pleasantly balls-out. To my shame I thought I was a bit bored, or at least over-familiar, with Chekhov; this ticket sort of fell into my lap. And so I’m happy I went to Chekhov's satyr play of a first drama--grinning at the memory of it, really.
Everything in this production hinged on the title character, and on the actor’s decision to play him as a fun Scott--like Ewan McGregor before he stopped getting offered fun parts. "Fucks everything that moves" is something that can be said of too few characters in the nineteenth-century drama, but in this case the shoe fits. The character was played in a near-pantomime mode, but with no ironic distance or fourth-wall-breaking: this Platonov was a man genuinely surprised at what is happening to him, and with no sense that he is causing it. And so, the ethical puzzle typical of late-century drama--"yes I want you, but I want you to want me to want you"--is played instead as cheerful hysteria. Why shouldn't Platonov love everyone? Aside from the husbands of the women he's sleeping with, and his wife. But, yeah: why not?
What a fun bit of early-career throat-clearing. Characters throughout say that they’re not like people in novels or plays. Platonov in particular wants to be, I think, in improv, where everyone has to say yes. Short of maybe Richard III, I can't think of another play where I enjoyed everything hinging on one character. (As opposed to plays that are in love with a dickhead male character; these are of course a dime a dozen.) When Platonov was away everyone went stagey and flat; near him everyone was loose-limbed and experimental, curious about what the hell was going to happen next. Early on one character says they thought the young Platonov would be like Byron, and this is how he winds up: as Byron before he leaves England, half-heartedly keeping his mistress apart from his half-sister but (one imagines) contemplating the possibilities.
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