Harold Pinter theatre, London
Emilia Clarke and Indira Varma star in Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-back West End production which asks probing questions about performance
Chekhov’s drama about love and the creative endeavour opens with failure. Konstantin, an aspiring playwright, has put on his first drama for a small audience in this outpost of the Russian countryside. They all scratch their heads at its gnomic abstractions and dismiss it, except for the doctor, Dorn, who is more open-minded: “I didn’t understand it but I will remember it.”
Jamie Lloyd’s radical, stripped-back, strangely gripping production, using Anya Reiss’s cool adaptation, might well be aspiring to Konstantin’s ideal of creating a new theatrical form. This is not Chekhov as we know it, nor theatre as we know it, certainly not in the West End. Its flagrant non-naturalism recalls Lloyd’s roaringly radical Cyrano de Bergerac, with actors arranging and rearranging themselves on plastic chairs and speaking with mics on Soutra Gilmour’s set of woodchip board walls.
At the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 10 September.
