David Hare's exuberant adaptation of Chekhov's rarely-performed Ivanov, currently running at London's Almeida Theatre, is fascinating for a number of reasons. Not only is the demand for tickets causing old-style crowds to gather in the narrow street outside, vainly hoping for cancellations, but it is confirming the status of now double Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes as Britain's leading young actor.
Jonathan Kent's lively production has drawn superb performances from an excellent cast. Above all, the play was Chekhov's "first to be staged, and reveals an unexpected side to the master, whose reputation has always "rested on his four later masterworks, culminating in The Cherry Orchard (1904). Ivanov, originally written during a two-week period in 1887 when Chekhov was 27, is a melodrama from a playwright opposed to the melodramatic. It is also controversial anti-semitic, brutally satirical and offering a decidedly unheroic romantic hero. Unhappily married to Anna (a superb Harriet Walter), who adores him but whom he no longer loves, Ivanov, spends his days doing nothing, save staving off all attempts at conversation by doggedly reading and fatalistically watching his decaying estate collapse into further ruin. He is unmoved by his tubercular wife's slow death and the insistent demands of her frantic young doctor that Ivanov bring her South to save her. And he is now attracted to Sasha, the idealistic daughter of Lebedev, the chairman of the local council and his moneylender-wife, to whom he owes a vast sum. Preoccupied by his own apathy, Ivanov when laments having married a Jew, speaks only of his former dreams, ambitions and lost energy.
The plan's deliberately non-moralistic moral no doubt added to its wary initial reception. The complex personal crisis tormenting Ivanov is going on amidst an often raucous burlesque. Never has Chekhov's comedy been as earthy as it is here, at times brilliantly caught by the loud, vulgar little estate steward Borkin (Anthony O'Donnell) and Count Shabyelski (Oliver Ford Davies), Ivanov uncle, a mean-minded fallen aristocrat charged with entertaining Anna. Best of all is Bill Paterson's outstanding and sympathetic Lebedev, a drunkard cowed by his greedy wife (played with shrill indignation by Rosemary McHale) but probably more vulnerable because of his love for his daughter Sasha and his genuine bewildered affection for Ivanov.
While the dramatic tension builds between Ivanov and his persecutor Lvov, a marvellously rigid and self-righteous Colin Tierney, continually reminding Ivanov of his many sins and of Lvov's overpowering honesty - an honesty which becomes the play's ruling comic motif - the other characters exchange barbed dialogue. There is a wonderful set piece in which the three drunks discuss food.
For all its rawness, this is an affecting, well-structured play availing of standard devices such as snobbery, gossip, avarice and marriage as calculated social betterment. Most interesting of all is the young Chekhov's creation of a narrow world in which various characters appear to bustle, barge and drink their respective routes through daily life. Meanwhile, Ivanov, in Fiennes's remarkable study of utter despair, clutches at the empty air, desperate for escape.
