Knock-off Chekhov

Calling all thespians. Roll up, you theatre folk. The Hampstead’s new show is a dramatic love-in you can’t afford to miss. Farewell to the Theatre introduces us to Harley Granville-Barker, one of the greatest playwrights of the early 20th century, as he enjoys a sabbatical in Massachusetts in 1916. Everything is languid, atmospheric and high-minded. Granville-Barker is busy giving lectures and watching American productions of Shakespeare while one of his chums, a literature professor, has had a bust-up with another academic. It’s a pity this off-stage conflict doesn’t test or expose Granville-Barker at all. He just lolls around the garden of a country house making cold, lofty speeches about the theatre and generally being a didactic pest. Other characters blunder in and out saying things like, ‘Perhaps it might rain,’ or, ‘Are there any cakes?’ In a tension-heightening moment, a woman murmurs, ‘I think something bad’s going to happen.’

Plays of this kind are very commonplace. Writer Richard Nelson, like many a hopeful before him, has chosen to emulate the most imitable of great playwrights, Chekhov. It’s a perfectly understandable mistake. All that humdrum mundanity, all that actionless dialogue, all those elegantly ruined mansions full of washouts and bores indulging in absurd and predictable antics. No sweat, says the wannabe genius, I could do that! But he finds he can’t. Chekhov, he soon learns, is a miracle worker who imparts a magical dynamism and vibrancy to his mildewed characters and their vacuous natter. So the chastened copycat, having discovered that Chekhov is beyond him, quietly shreds his script and turns his talents to a fresh arena (possibly bar work or telesales).

What he doesn’t do — or shouldn’t do — is to send his play to Ed Hall, the Hampstead supremo, with a Post-it note attached saying, ‘Herewith my Chekhovian masterpiece!’ Not only has Ed Hall accepted the show but he’s put it in the hands of the seasoned and versatile director Roger Michell.