The Stage

Radio - Drama

Published Tuesday 9 February 2010 at 09:40 by Moira Petty

I can’t help thinking that BBC Radio is running its Chekhov season six years too late. The year 2004 marked the centenary of his death of tuberculosis - although a physician, he thought predictions of his forthcoming demise were premature. His famous remark that his work might be popular for seven more years, was made a few months before his death, when he thought he had about six years to live.

So why not mark his passing, at 44, which seems more emblematic of the tragic loss he captured in his writing, than his birth, which at 150 years ago, isn’t such an iconic number? Oddly, his wife Olga recounted the death which many a champagne socialist would favour - he drank a glass of bubbly, lay down and drifted off like a child going to sleep. Often acclaimed as the greatest short story writer ever, Chekhov’s personal swan song became a bit of a legend and inspired another of the literary form’s leading exponents, Raymond Carver, to write The Errand.

No such rosy glow accompanied the major life events of any of the characters in The Seagull, the first of the four celebrated plays of his mature years. Loaded with symbols of tragedy, frustration, thwarted ambition and unrequited love, the prevailing mood was often one of artistically genteel, if sometimes slightly hysterical, melancholy. This new Scottish production, adapted by Stuart Paterson, announced from the off that it aimed to convey the comedy Chekhov had intended.

So, Siobhan Redmond’s fading actress Irina was part Gertrude, to her son Konstantin’s Hamlet, and partly the senior vixen in a well-scripted soap. Like the Danish Prince, the wannabe playwright Konstantin (Robin Laing) toyed petulantly with the idea of death, as if choosing between competing puddings on a menu, before going into a riff on love pitched somewhere between Byron and Mills and Boon. The magical setting by a lakeside, where the cast of malcontents were gathered, was broken somewhat by the cartoon howling of a guard dog just as the preternaturally gloomy Masha (Meg Fraser) was trying to unburden herself of her life’s woes.

The production encouraged the audience to step back from the assembled misery - and, certainly, Lady Luck was not with these folks - and watch them nurture the seedlings of their future wretchedness. You really would have had a heart of stone not to laugh as the characters paraded like the denizens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, touched by misdirected love potions. This was humankind at its most ridiculous. Only the ingenue Nina grew wiser and ironic, although not about her thespian skills - Ashley Smith made her the most hilariously wooden of actresses in the play within a play.

Nine years after Chekhov’s death, Arthur Ransome arrived in Moscow to translate Russian fairy stories - and escape an unhappy marriage - and was on hand to make the transition to war reporter when the Bolshevik Revolution erupted. Gary Lyons’ play, Amazonia, charted how Ransome (the impressive Rory Kinnear) fell in love with Trotsky’s secretary and was recruited by M15. Biographical dramas can become mired in fact, but here the elements of romance, espionage and an incisive psychological autopsy of Ransome, gelled.

Producer James Robinson marshalled the troops for nine playlets - varied but each absorbingly specific - which made up Postcards From a Cataclysm. The world may have been about to end, but Josie Long’s girl still couldn’t get out of bed promptly and Tim Crouch’s elderly couple ploughed disarmingly through a questionnaire on obsessive compulsive disorder. There was something Chekhovian in the way Armageddon was about to happen off stage, while humans got on with the minutiae of love and loss.

PROGRAMMES

The Seagull R3, Sunday, January 31

Amazonia R3, Sunday, February 7

Postcards From a Cataclysm R4, Wednesday, February 10