Left – John Howard and Ewen Leslie. Cover – Blazey Best, Ewen Leslie and Helen Thomson. Photos – Brett BoardmanIs it a sort of showbiz shirt fronting of our new Prime Minister that opens the second half of Eamon Flack's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Ivanov at Belvoir Street?
The cast form a chorus line to sing Advance Australia Fair in Russian, a portrait of Malcolm Turnbull clutched front and centre with a photo of Putin looking down from a wall.
This is cheeky Chekhov, set in a contemporary rural Russia that is alarmingly alike contemporary country Australia, its characters redolent of Muscovites on the Murrumbidgee.
The titular character, Ivanov, is a failed scholar, scribe and agriculturalist, broke and yoked to a terminally ill wife and an unworkable mortgage. “Chicken Little in man form” is how his cousin, Borkin describes him.
Also living on the farm is his uncle, Shabelsky, a self proclaimed refugee from his heyday, who has a monologue with a thought that encapsulates this production's primal theme:
“It was not capitalism, it was not market liberalism, it was public good that did for me. I was the child of progress... it was what we used to talk about before we talked about growth.”
The collapse of the commonwealth and selling off the farm are crucial concerns in Flack's affable and relaxed parable of societal and cultural squandering.
Allusions to Hamlet abound and there is something definitely rotten in this state of tasteless nouveau riche.
Ewen Leslie carries the title role of the monologist non monogamous Ivanov with a range that covers laconic loquaciousness to energetic inertia.
John Bell shines as the dishevelled and shickered, Shabelsky, jockeying for pole position to wed the freshly minted widow and heiress to a hog farm, Marfa Babakina, referred to affectionately as Miss Piggy.
Blazey Best brings home the comedic bacon with her fastidiously detailed characterisation of Marfa, attuned to market forces and her own marketability in the marriage stakes.
Confirming it is a comedy, Fayssal Bazzi imbues Borkin with an outlandish clowning aspect, while pathos and empathetic poignancy is presented in the performances of Zahra Newman as Ivanov's doomed and discarded wife, Anna, John Howard, as Lebedev, whose daughter, Sasha (Airlie Dodds), has begun an affair with Ivanov, and Yalin Ozucelik as Anna's frustrated physician, Lvov.
Helen Thomson as Mrs Lebedev is platinum as the cost of everything but value of nothing new millionairess,
From Chekhov to Coward, Sheridan to Shaw, the servants traditionally steal the show, and Mel Dyer as the maid, Gabriella, follows that tradition in a perfectly purloining performance.
Belvoir presents
Ivanov
by Anton Chekhov | adapted by Eamon Flack
Director Eamon Flack
Venue: Belvoir St Theatre | 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills
Dates: 19 September – 1 November 2015
Tickets: Full from $72* | Concession $49
Bookings: 02 9699 3444 | belvoir.com.au
