Peak performance

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 24th September 2008

Ivanov
Wyndham’s Theatre

Now or Later
Royal Court

Rain Man
Apollo

Great directors have the power to alter taste. Michael Grandage’s avowed aim with this revival of Ivanov, which opens the Donmar’s year-long residency at the Wyndham’s, is to secure the play a permanent place in the repertory. But even a director as sure-footed as Grandage can’t overcome the script’s shortcomings. Dashed off in ten days by a 27-year-old Chekhov, it feels glib and careless, its imitative homages to Hamlet creaky and self-conscious. Ivanov is a country landowner, his debts climbing, his marriage sinking, infatuated with a neighbour’s young daughter and with a peculiar taste for philosophical ramblings. All of Chekhov’s themes are here but unmoulded and poorly integrated. Most noticeably he hasn’t yet mastered the dynamic lethargy, the melancholy but vibrant inertia that give his later plays their aura of tragic, footling waste. Yet for all its shortcomings this is still a fascinating night out. Kenneth Branagh’s easy-blokeish Ivanov is a pleasure and Gina McKee (far too beautiful for the role of consumptive cast-off wife) turns the needy shrew into something poetic and captivating. The ultimate effect of this production is to make the four great Chekhovs seem all the greater.

Dominic Cooke has picked another winner, Now or Later, at the Royal Court. We’re in a Washington hotel on election night and as the results roll in it looks like young John’s dad is about to become president. But a video of John gatecrashing a frat party dressed as Mohammed has reached the web and threatens to wreck his father’s presidency. Will John apologise? Upstairs a war-room convenes and minions are dispatched to talk some sense into the sulky miscreant. A thuggish spin-doctor, a wise-cracking southern activist and John’s chilly, shifty mother — all try and fail to extract a statement of contrition from him. We learn that the stunt was no boorish prank, but a piece of visual agitprop intended to expose the hypocrisy of confused liberals on his campus who’d supported a Muslim group’s calls to censor images of the Prophet.

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