Sons Without Fathers, Plays Without Content

David Levesley gives his take on the Belgrade Theatre production of Checkhov’s Sons Without Fathers.

There was a moment tonight in Sons Without Fathers where a character yelled (and I paraphrase) ‘for God’s sake, you’re behaving like a character in a modernist drama, just LIVE!’ They could not have articulated my thoughts better.

Platonov is Chekhov’s first play and behaves like a sort of proto-Seagull, or a world in which Masha suffered a blow to the head and witnessed an alternate reality. We have a doctor with a sardonic tongue, a past-her-prime actress who claims men like she’s choosing a lobster from the tank, a woman in the principal’s periphery who is utterly in love, said suffering Hamlet-esque principal, his idealised would-be partner and her older husband. What follows is… Well, sort of like The Seagull. Where Chekhov’s most famous play is concise Platonov reels on for hours and hours and Sons Without Fathers is little better. The final act is less a tense series of confrontations between Platonov and every other cast member and more a slalom for the audience as we count off on our fingers how many cast members there are feasibly left to appear on the stage.

In this ‘new version’ there is little to be lauded as new. What could be a harmless farce with a tragic ending is turned into a analysis of matriarchy and patriarchy (or so they suggest, though this is somewhat clutching at straws) as strong women and absent fathers war over Platonov’s heart. A man of asides and monologues in a play that keeps addressing its audience in a world past the point of accepting prosaic soliloquy, Platonov is charmingly portrayed by Jack Laskey but even his performance cannot save an utterly irredeemable person, who is not only unlikeable but offered every chance for escape and takes none of them (which makes it very hard to see him as tragic.)

Jack is supported by a beautiful and comparatively subtle performance from Marianne Oldham as Sophia, the girl of his best friend, who is at her most elemental with him; the chemistry the two of them have on stage is absolute and rare in a production filled with physical interaction and lacking often in emotional connections. The performances are so trained and tight that often they lack even performativity; the actors feel no more at home in social pretense than they do in tormented sincerity. Instead much of the play occurs at the same pace and pitch of strong projection and good diction with everything else lost in the mire.

Simon Scardfield’s Doctor is a delight to watch when inebriated (which is most of the play) but in the bookending acts in moments of sobriety his inflection and chaos is painful to watch. Susie Trayling’s Petrovna starts off as a stock performance of a cougar but softens by the end of the play; by the time her final ‘farewell’ scene with Platonov arrives it is one of beauty, subtlety and alliance in the pit of despair they find themselves in. It is a heart-wrenching and warm scene and deserved to be the penultimate scene, not the exhausting halfway point of the final slalom.

The script- and indeed production- is in dire need of finding itself. Does it want to be pantomime or heartfelt? Does it want to be comic or tragic? Does it want to be modern or classic? For every mention of rubles and kopeks there is the mention of ‘the battle of Stalingrad’ by a messenger in antiquated gear who stands in a room full of people dressed like they are out of a small town from the here and now in Britain. Whilst inherently Russian (and this is embraced throughout) the production design sometimes falls into a mire of blank, reflective surfaces, timeless furniture and anachronistic costumes in the hope that too much of everything equates to timelessness.

The projection in the show is also perplexing; the fireworks do not look quite right, the rain seems like a game of Tetris on the back wall, and the quite frankly vexing musical interludes for mid-half act changes resulted in one very peculiar moment where the KKK seemed to be performing a musical number whilst the maids and servants rebuilt the house. The music and lighting was often highly effective in capturing an atmosphere (the garden of Act 3 for example, or the raucous party of Act 2 which, whilst it sounded like it was soundtracked by Eurovision winners, got across the mood of a room aside from the home of an epic soiree) but when given centre stage it just felt like an unnecessary and tacky addition to a production that was trying to be slick.

I wish I had cared more about Sons Without Fathers. Thematically it is interesting, there are scenes and lines of brilliance (especially when the play actually gets onto something meaty) but if it wants to be a brilliant play it cannot also be a light and bubbly farce, which it feels like it should be at least half the time. Platonov is a confused play because it is written by a young Chekhov and it shows – it feels gratuitous and self-complimenting as the young intellectual bests the rich, the old and the fastidious and infatuates every woman he sees. Whilst Petrovna’s power, independence and equal score on heartbreaking in the play shows hope it is not his finest work and does not feel like it needs the money that has been pumped onto the stage, or the money your ticket will give to it.