Moscow Station





By Elisabeth Mahoney
Radio Review
Guardian Unlimited
October 22, 2001



Moments into The Sunday Play: Ivanov (Radio 3), I knew we were in safe, rewarding hands. David Hare's adaptation for radio of Chekhov's play began with some beautifully elegiac music, composed by Nick Bocat. It was music to stare mournfully out of windows to; music for swishing around in a long skirt, with moist eyes, a love letter in your hand and the heaviest of hearts. After each of the most devastatingly glum scenes - and this being Chekhov, there were tens of them - a few bars of it would underline the mood, growing darker by the minute. This is a play in which, when Ivanov says "time to go", he doesn't mean he's got a train to catch. He means he's about to blow his brains out.

Yet for all the gloom, this was a sparkling adaptation, reminding us how Chekhov, even in this early work, feels both ultra-modern and yet also Shakespearean in his forensic look at the human condition. Ivanov, played with tremendous, terrible power by Ralph Fiennes, is a "man beaten at 35", five years into a marriage with a Jewish woman, Anna Petrovna (Harriet Walter). She is dying of tuberculosis; his love for her has already died, and he is tumbling into a metaphysical crisis entirely at odds with the Russian provincial world he inhabits. When Anna dies, he has the chance of a new life with Sasha, a glossily optimistic young woman, who thinks she can save Ivanov from himself. She can't, of course.

What was most striking in the play, apart from the first-rate performances, was the way every social exchange, every scene, is tinged with violence, death and loathing. Anna describes her falling in love with Ivanov by saying "my life died, I killed it"; Lebedev mutters "I wish to God you'd just die" to his wife. When Anna attempts to salvage her relationship with Ivanov, the best she can come up with is that the two of them could sit in the study, "in the dark, as we once sat in the dark, and you can talk about your unhappiness". That's about as good as love gets here.

The anti-Semitic, conservative, narrow-minded Russian middle-class world ("you miserable sponges" is how Sasha greets her parents' friends) is what the protagonists pull away from, through drink (Lebedev), romantic idealism (Sasha) and suicide (Ivanov). As they do, in Hare's deeply evocative production, owls screech in the night, shattering any peace, and fireworks - dangerous, noisy shocks of light - fizz into the night sky. "You dirty Jew", Ivanov calls Anna, finally, in one of their last conversations, before telling her she's soon to die. That music starts up again, like a deadly leitmotif. You know it won't be long before both of these miserable lives are snuffed out.






 

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