It’s bracing to watch Chekhov’s first extant play, written when he was barely out of his teens, and realise how close to fully formed the playwright’s voice already was. The fraying family units, the ennui like thick fog, the country house, the japes covering for desperation – it’s all here.
The ineluctable stasis of his characters has an additional frisson of sadness in Platonov due to their youth. They’re just old enough to recognise the gap between the grandeur of their expectations and the everyday reality that confronts them. That Chekhov could essay characters at this point in their lives – Platonov is around 27 – so convincingly and sympathetically when he himself was only 20 is all the more remarkable.
Anthony Skuse’s production at ATYP strips a couple of hours off the original text and whittles the cast of characters from 20 to 14. At three hours it’s still no stripling, but it’s a credit to Skuse and to the cast that it flies by. Platonov (Charlie Garber) is the Byronic type, ready with a quip and deliberately provocative, admired by men and capable of inducing infatuation in women. He’s also got a taste for louche self-destruction that would do John Wilmot proud. Orbiting around him is a constellation of friends and family, whose lives are upended when Platonov seduces Sofya (Geraldine Hakewill), the wife of his cousin, despite being in a loving marriage to the simple, good-hearted Sasha (Matilda Ridgway). “She’s stupid and I’m worthless”, as Platonov puts it. “We’re happy”.
Skuse as director and designer makes no attempt at naturalistic staging, with only chairs scattered about the empty floorboards, but the stage’s emptiness feels wonderfully intimate. The decision to have the bleachers face each other, instead of at a right angle facing the stage, means it’s impossible to hide in the darkened safety of the stalls, and it gives the whole thing a nice touch of complicity. Garber is utterly convincing as the charismatic truth-teller with little regard for feelings, his own or those of others. And Ridgway is very moving as his heartbroken wife. It’s fascinating to see the young Chekhov ape Tolstoy when Sasha, upon discovering Platonov’s infidelity, attempts to throw herself in front of a train. When Chekhov wrote his untitled play, Anna Karenina had finished its serialisation only the year before.
In some sort of cosmic fluke, the STC is staging the same play next year, under the title The Present, and starring Richard Roxburgh and Cate Blanchett. Leaving aside the age factor, they’ll have their work cut out to top this.
4/5 stars
Platonov is playing at ATYP Studio 1, The Wharf until Saturday November 22.
