Hi All, this was sent anonymously for posting. Please read and enjoy. I have heard and read about the brilliance of this particular production of Chekhov's "Unfinished Play" (Platonov) but have never seen it of course and have never heard it quite described in this fashion. It is a telling and insightful description and I will write more and hope to have more on Lev Dodin soon.
-David
After 30+ years of theatre experience I finally saw the kind of theatre I have been dreaming of seeing all that time. This was not the current production of Dodin's Maly Drama Theatre playing in the Lincoln Center Festival -- "Life and Fate" -- as I will see that tomorrow. No, this was a film of one act (2 hours long) of his production of Chekhov's "Untitled Play" commonly known as "Platonov". I have never seen perfect theatre before until this production. The sense of what a permanent theatre company and only a permanent company can achieve because they are all trained in the same craft approach and all share the same vision of what theatre is deep in their individual and collective beings was alive in every second of Dodin's profoundly illuminating and overwhelmingly humane production of Chekhov. It embodied what happens in theatre when rehearsals last for years and even after productions open they are allowed to continue to evolve year after year in both performance and in continuing rehearsals. There was no hint of the current popular approach to Chekhov where he is turned into an Oxford wit, simplistic postmodern semiotics or a Russian Neil Simon. The production was a comic delight but in a Chekhovian sense -- the truth of human thought, feeling and action, i.e. behavior and how so much of this living on our part is funny because we are so blind and desperate in our needs and self delusion. We may even see ourselves doing it but we cannot stop. All we can do is laugh at our own foolishness while loving it. Nothing is "hit" as being a comic convention and yet everything makes one smile and cry in delightful recognition of HUMAN beings. The acting is truly experiential action. As Meyerhold said, "words are only the embellishment on the tapestry of movement" meaning that theatre, fundamentally, has nothing to do with words. With Dodin, words are the embellishment on the tapestry of LIVING expressed within deeply imaginative theatrical form. Like all the great theatre masters, Dodin never turns his actors into puppets of some ridiculous intellectualized postmodern concept plopped onto the play's theme as a critical conversation piece for academic "brain theatre". His actors live as independent beings in the world of the play and production and with a moment to moment improvisatory reality that is absent on Broadway and American regional theatre but is the essence of great acting -- not to mention theatre itself. The staging is both the natural life of a group of friends and enemies partying by a lake -- the lake is on stage and people swim, play musical instruments, jump in from 20 feet above to commit suicide, splash one another, hang from pier poles, role up on the (actual)sandy shoreline, while lighted candles float by in the water -- and at the same time the staging is a theatrical expression of the psychological levels of the play and its people which physicalizes both visually and emotionally what it all means; what Chekhov is saying. The seamless mix of all the actors playing musical instruments all through the play -- actors form a jazz band as well as play as soloists -- at almost any unexpected time while doing it so unselfconsciously as to make the inherent theatricality here seem to be just a musical extension of the character's soul, coupled with the playing of early jazz music, gloriously playful dancing and gorgeously human singing of all of sorts makes this production truly theatrical in a way that defines what theatricality actually is -- a deepening and sharpening of content and form without loosing the living emotional humanity of the actor. The stage is alive with levels of existence. Scenes are played in the foreground while the entire implied life of the play's circumstances and the production's vision continue all over the multi-leveled set behind the text based action. Never have I seen the visions of Meyerhold and Stanislavsky so fully combined. Its as if Meyerhold had Stanislavsky's great actors in his productions or as if Meyerhold was directing as Stanislavsky worked with the actors. Both sides of the coin of real theatre were onstage when one usually only gets heads or tails in the name of some director's personal "style". It is truly living psychophysical theatre seamlessly imagined as a theatrical form. This is multi-dimensional living on stage and a perfection of direction, conception and execution unknown in American theatre. One actor plays a scene with a mixture of lust, longing, anger, love, amusement and bewilderment that I did not think possible for any actor to achieve as living breathing emotional truth on stage. Something so simple as a character turning a chair on its side and sitting on that side becomes immensely expressive of the moment and the character. Truthful feeling flows everywhere and the explosive nature of emotion is given free reign in a way American theatre lost long ago. Actors use an old Meyerholdian trick of writing certain lines on the walls of the set and Dodin makes this completely natural, justified and theatrical all at once -- true theatre. The ease and relaxation of the actors on stage is terrifying -- not to mention their concentration and imaginative action plus an interpersonal emotional freedom and flow. As if all this was not enough, Dodin fashions a masterpiece out of Chekhov's early and unfinished play. I had read the play as left by Chekhov years ago and found it a tangled mess. Dodin drops around 10 characters and several lines of action in the text; adds 10 waiters/servants for the gentry class in the play (they form the jazz band and serve as kind of stage hands in tuxedos moving furniture pieces on and off, albeit justified within the play's action and set a magnificent table full of real food that is eaten on stage, especially by one piggish character) and in the process Dodin shapes a literary masterpiece as well as its theatrical embodiment out of Chekhov's messy play. I left thinking this is the most brilliant Chekhov play of all. After finally seeing what the Stanislavsky's, Meyerhold's, Vakhtangov's, Brecht's and Strasberg's dreamed of theatre being it will be hard to stomach anything less. When the art of theatre is finally achieved it is like nothing else. Too bad its as rare as a unicorn.
> No, this was a film of one act (2 hours long)
ReplyDelete> of his production of Chekhov's "Untitled Play"
> commonly known as "Platonov".
Is this film currently available as a DVD or VHS, or is it available for rent at someplace like Casa Video? I searched the Web for quite some time trying to identify what film this specifically is, and was unsuccessful.
Thanks!
--Tom W.
Tom, I don't believe the filmed version of the stage production that the writer is referring to is released to the public in general. I think it must have been a special screening or presentation. There is a film that you may have come across in your search entitled "An Unfinished Piece for Player Piano" which is based on the same script. Its excellent too. Bill K. used to have a copy I think. But that one is a true film made on location and all that. Its worth seeing for sure.
ReplyDelete-D
Here is a review from a couple of years ago when the production played in London.
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The acclaimed Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg returns to the Barbican with its astonishing production of Chekhov's Platonov. The play – one of Chekhov's earliest works – was discovered among his papers after his death, and for years was known as ‘the play with no name.'
Mikhail Platonov is an impoverished schoolmaster who draws women to him apparently without thought or intent. Tormented by the gulf between the idealism of his youth and the narrow, self-seeking world he now inhabits, his arrival at his lover's summer-house sets off a kind of vortex of frustrated ambition and desire. His placid wife Sasha is apparently oblivious to his lover Anna, a witty, plump little thing perpetually trying to needle Platonov into desire. She's oblivious, too, to the arrival of a former lover, Sofya, and to the sudden and frantic obsession of the young Maria. Platonov, played with electrifying charisma by Sergei Kuryshev, embodies a certain kind of tragic Russian spirit: passionately but uncertainly idealistic, and painfully aware of the frailties of humanity.
There's a supremely Chekhovian sub-plot to do with the need to sell Anna's estate. I was much too transfixed by Platonov himself to care one way or the other about the fate of the property, but the continued anxious reference to it gives the play an uneasy air, as if all the characters – however sumptuously clothed – are a month or two away from destitution.
The play - which was rehearsed for seven years by director Lev Dodin and the Maly cast – runs almost to four hours. It has inevitable longeurs, and no doubt an older Chekhov would have exercised a little restraint, but there's a certain pleasure in watching a production that positively revels in dramatic excess. No corner of human behaviour goes unexamined: violence, madness, betrayal, vengeance, suicide – all these are thrown in. The cast rise to the challenge with an energy almost exhausting to watch.
The staging for this production is nothing short of miraculous. Beneath a wooden gallery, and flanked by steps leading up to decking on either side, is a long pool receding back the whole depth of the stage. That the actors would move in and out of the water wasn't surprising, but when Platonov dived in full-length there was a collective gasp. The play's first half consists almost entirely of a party at Anna's house, with the cast moving constantly through the set, playing instruments on the gallery, lighting candles, swimming from side to side.
That the performance was entirely in Russian, with surtitles for we poor monoglot English, seemed hardly to matter. The actors perform far beyond their lines: Platonov's face is so expressive it sometimes resembles a Japanese Noh mask, all tragic downturned eyes and mouth. His old lover Sofya is pale as milk with a tumble of pre-Raphaelite hair, and inhabits a sort of miserable stillness in the centre of the storm, while Anna bobs about the stage like a glossy little blackbird. One of the most wordless scenes comes when Platonov and Sofya fall into the pool together, and what follows is so breathtakingly erotic the theatre went silent as a cathedral, with the exception a gentleman three rows back who murmured "oh my."
Perhaps what's most notable about the play is that despite the sombreness of the story, and the awful inevitability of its conclusion, it manages somehow to be a perversely uplifting experience. It suggests that tragedy oughtn't to be despised, if it's just another thread in the messy, wonderful tapestry of living. These men and women dance, fight, get drunk, kiss and are kissed, play jazz and set off fireworks. If this is how they party, I thought to myself, I'm going to get me some Russian friends.