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.
