Vanya at Richmond Theatre

There are three main names associated with this play, all of which I am interested in; Anton Chekhov’s wrote the original play Uncle Vanya, Simon Stephens wrote this new version and Andrew Scott played all the parts.

I half thought about doing a Venn diagram of my experience of these people but quickly though better of it. Suffice to say I have seen several plays by both Chekhov and Stephens, a few with Scott, another Stephens version of a Chekhov play and another Stephens play staring Scott, so the Venn diagram would have several entries in the overlaps of two people. This would be the first entry in the central overlap of all three people.

I presume that of these three names that Andrew Scott was the big draw, while he would have been third on my list, and the poster certainly reflected that. The promoters were certainly expecting a big crowd for this pre-west end run and the tickets were priced accordingly. The price for my normal seat was around £60, I think, so I went up a level instead and paid £30 for Upper Circle A14. I may have been a little cautious with my money but I was off the mark quickly enough to bag a central seat in the front row,

On the day the performance, and the entire week-long run, were sold out so I guess the promoters knew what they were doing.

The set surprised me a little with its modernity and clutter. I never understood the point of the modernity (other that audience recognition perhaps) but the clutter soon made sense as the different parts of the stage were often used to represent different characters, e.g. Helena often sat on the swing.

I had seen Uncle Vanya a few times, three I think, and that certainly helped as the differences between the characters were slight visually, e.g. Scott held a dishcloth in one persona. Of course the voices were different, but not very different.

Uncle Vanya's (Ivan's) story got a little lost in the theatrics and my attention was drawn to the performance at the expense of the story, which is not that dramatic anyway, despite the appearance of Chekhov's favourite prop, a gun. It did not feel like the retelling of a masterpiece, it was more like a brand new play. Nothing particularly wrong in that and most people were there for Scott not Chekhov anyway.

The Stephens version had a lot more swearing, though nothing like the level of some of his other plays (Christmas, Herons, ...), and also quite a few moments of humour that often played on only having one person on stage. Vanya is not a comedy but I chortled quite a bit.

Being a one-person show the success of Vanya depended on Scott and he delivered.

I do not think that anyone will love Anton Chekhov or Simon Stephens more after seeing Vanya, and they may even forget that they were involved. Scott, on the other-hand, Andrew Scott cemented his reputation and he is what made the evening work for me.

The Cherry Orchard at Union Theatre was sharp and satisfying

I am doing a pretty good job at seeing (almost) every Chekhov production in London even if it takes a bit of juggling to do so. To see The Cherry Orchard at Union Theatre I had to go into London on the weekend, a Saturday, and that was to catch the final performance.

I still think that Union Theatre undercharges a little and a ticket price of £22.50 meant a very full house. I was sitting in the front row, as always, so could not tell if it was completely full but it looked pretty close.

I had made something of a day of it in London going to Barbican Theatre for a matinee before walking down to Union Theatre in Southwark, taking in a visit to a Paul cafe and PokemonGo Raid along the way. The Millennium Bridge was ridiculously busy and needs widening.

I got to Union Theatre around 6pm and comforted myself with a pint of Kozel while waiting for the Box Office to open at 6:30pm. Once I had claimed my Batch 1 token I went to Culture Grub for my usual Szechuan style vegetable curry, returning to the theatre in good time to be at the front of the queue, i.e. to be number one not just one of the first ten.

The staging surprised me a little because in the first two shows in this series of three there had been stairs up on either side of the stage but this time is was set conventionally. And neatly. It just oozed faded Russian country house.

I had seen Cherry Orchard a few times, and as recently as the year before, and while I would not claim to be anything like word-perfect I did quickly spot a significant difference. Admittedly if I had looked at the poster I might have been less surprised.

This Cherry Orchard, written in 1903, was moved forward a few years to 1917 and the Russian Revolution. This added to the existing theme in the play where the landed gentry were losing out to the new merchant class. The Revolution took this redistribution of land a stage further. I think it worked well; The Cherry Orchard is partially a political play and to ignore the Revolution (which Chekhov obviously did not know was coming) left this thread effectively unfinished.

The rest of The Cherry Orchard is about the large cast of characters, their reactions (or lack of them) to the political situation and to each other and this Cherry Orchard covered this supremely. I got very frustrated with the people refusing to recognise what was about to happen to them, happy for the people who were unbowed by the changes and tearful for the couple who never quite came together. The non-proposal scene was the most poignant in the play.

Judging by the running time, something just under two hours with an interval, quite a bit had been cut here and there (much to the confusion of the man next to me trying to follow the script in Chinese) but Chekhov can be wordy and cutting a theme or two makes little difference to the totality of the play.

The ending was familiar enough though the thing that happens happened to another person. That change worked well too.

This was a very delightful and enjoyable version of The Cherry Orchard made sharper by its slight but significant shift in time.

The Lady with a Dog at Tabard Theatre

I try to see everything Chekhov in London and so The Lady With A Dog got on to my must-see list when it appeared on the schedule at White Bear Theatre. Annoyingly I just could not find the time to see it on its short run there so I was mightily pleased when it transferred to the even more convenient Tabard Theatre. I could find an evening for it there and the £19.5 asking price for Row A Seat 3 was no obstacle.

I had seen a few Chekhov short stories turned into plays but those had always kept their Russian and C19 setting and were quite short whereas this was set in Scotland in 1923 and was a full-length play.

The lady with a dog was on holiday in Berwick waiting for her busy husband to escape from Council to work to come and join her when she met an older equally married man who was on holiday by himself. That meeting was manufactured by the man who, we soon learned, had manufactured similar meetings in previous holidays there. Things developed from there.

The way their story developed was surprising and the way that it was told was delightful.

It was interesting seeing it so soon after Tryst (six months felt like soon) where another manufactured relationship led to a wedding and then something a lot darker. Here a similar relationship that could have gone wrong in so many ways survived, and even flourished, despite the knowing presence of two spouses. It was all nicely done; yes he was a cad for starting the affair and yes they were both being unfaithful to decent partners but they still carried my sympathies and I was able to rejoice in their happiness.

The Lady with a Dog was one of those lovely plays that knew exactly what it was doing and did it beautifully. Having a Chekhov story to build on helped but there was a lot more to it than that, the mood was perfect throughout and that was largely due to four fine actors led by Richard Lynson and Beth Burrows as the unlikely couple. I loved it.

An excellent Three Sisters at The Union Theatre

I have seen Chekhov's Three sisters five times in recent years and all of the performances were good or better. This was possibly the best.

I go to all the Chekov that I can and The Union Theatre is one of my favourite theatres so this was unmissable. Stick a £15 price tag on the ticket and it would have been a crime.

It was good to get back to The Union Theatre again after a gap of a few months. That was nothing personal, just a lot of competition from other theatres for my evenings. I know what I am doing at The Union and that meant being there by 6:30pm when the box office opened to collect my ticket, popping along to Culture Grub for a Sichuan style curry and then back to the cafe to take into the first half of the performance.

I was first in to the theatre (after careful positioning by the door) and was pleased to see the stage set more or less in the round. It had been set traditionally on my previous visit to the new venue. I chose a seat in the middle of the row on the far side.

The stage was set as a living room with drinks out ready for a celebration, it was the 20th birthday of the youngest sister, Irina. Apart from the piano there were a couple of seats and that was about it. I like productions that use props sparingly so this was a good sign.

The cast were introduced to us gradually and carefully with each new arrival being name-checked for our benefit. Each character looked right to me and that continued throughout the play and the casting proved to be the play's main strength and that is why I thought so highly of the production.

The three sisters' lives were changed by two arrivals, the new army commander, Vershinin (Ashley Russell), and their brother's girlfriend Natasha (Francesca Burgoyne), and they were my two stars of the evening in what was a strong cast overall with no weak points.

The production played on the strength of having the large cast and there was often more than one thing happening at once. This was particularly true when relationships were forming between two of the sisters and two of the army men.

Every version of Three Sisters that I have seen has been a little different but without the chance to study the scripts it is difficult for me to say what and where the differences were. This was certainly a shorter version than some others and seemed to be faster paced because of that. In this edit the main theme was Vershinin refrain, "Happiness is not for us", though there was still space for Itina and Tusenbach to debate the virtue of work and to cosy up to each other a little.

I knew the story and yet I was still captivated by it. It was a rich story with significant threads for each of the sisters and their brother plus quite a few dramatic things happening elsewhere.

Above all this was an entertaining and rewarding production; entertaining because of the story and the characters, and rewarding because of the human themes covered.

Ivanov at the National Theatre

Sometimes deciding to see a play is easy, but rarely as easy as this.

There are four playwrights that I have Google Alerts set up for an Chekhov is one of them. These adaptations are by David Hare who has possibly been the biggest playwright in the UK for the last few decades.  They were staged at the Nation Theatre that has the infrastructure, and budget, to stage large productions.

I had thought about going down to Chichester to see the plays when they were first staged there last year but I was too disorganised to book tickets in time. I was not that worried as a London transfer seemed certain.

There were three plays in the season, Ivanov which I had not seen before and The Seagull and Platonov both of which I had only seen once. I was half tempted to go for the three plays in a day option but decided that would risk the three plays blurring into one. Obviously, That was not a problem when I saw Henry IV Parts I and II in a Shakespeare marathon.

My seat for Ivonov was Olivier Circle A23 for which I paid £32. I do not recall now if this was a preview price but it could have been as this was the first performance, a sign of how keen I was to see it.

The stage was superb and the photo does not do it justice as it is hard to make out the water flowing around the front of the stage and it does not show how parts of the stage went up and down to provide and remove props that transformed the stage, for example, from a garden to a dining room.

The central plot of Ivonov was simple enough. Nikolai Ivonov is a junior governor official fed up with his prospects and his wife of five years who he had fallen out of love with. She was ill with tuberculosis which increased his guilt. He spent most evening with his friend Paul Lebedev who hates his own wife, Zinaida, with a barely concealed passion. They had a twenty year old daughter, Sasha, who is infatuated with Ivanov and, understandably, he is interested in her too. Things developed from there.

I had not seen Ivanov before so could not tell how much was Chekhov and how much was Hare but the combination worked. The dialogue flowed briskly and smartly with a contemporary but not overly modern lilt. That dialogue took as deep into love, misery, power, deceit and bigotry (Ivanov's wife was a converted Jew). It was heady stuff with a few light touches added, as in Dickens some of the supporting characters were frivolous, which stopped the mood from getting too melancholy.

It was a large and top quality cast which included the magnificent Nina Sosanya as Ivanov's wife and the endearing Peter Egan as a bumbling uncle of Ivanov. There were some sixteen people in the cast and they all performed magnificently. The stage played its part too by being clever but not distractingly so. Likewise the lighting.

The whole production was professional without being cold, far from it actually. That left the play with plenty of space to breathe and to do what it wanted to do which was to emerge us deeply into the lives of a group of friends as they lived through some momentous events. It was enthralling to witness.

This may have been billed as an early Chekhov but it was very familiar Chekhov and that was what I was hoping to see.

Uncle Vanya at the Almeida Theatre

I knew of the Almeida Theatre mostly through my extensive lunchtime walks around Islington and I was looking for the opportunity to see something there when they duly obliged by putting on Uncle Vanya.

There is a risk that I might be coming something of a Chekhov completist but I have yet to find a good reason not to see a production of one of his plays and so I went to see this one. Besides, I had only seen Uncle Vanya once before and that was at the Arcola Theatre way back in May 2011. Since then there had also been the BBC drama production on radio but that only partially counts.

I did not know the inside of the theatre at all so I tried to play safe and went for the front row in the Circle where seat A18 cost me £38, the top price.

The seating was a little awkward as it was in benches of four people which meant that it was harder to get in and out of. It did not help that my bench was at a slight angle to the bench next to me as that reduced the limited legroom even more. I spent most of the evening touching other men's legs. The view was not brilliant either, though it was OK, and the lighting rig was less distracting when there was action on the stage to watch.

The stage was a black cube which made for a duller than usual picture, all you can really see is the rigging and some of the people downstairs.

This Uncle Vanya was almost an endurance test running for 200 minutes with, unusually, three 10 minute intervals. That is even longer than Scarface (170 minutes) and Wolf of Wall Street (180 minutes). The radio version of Uncle Vanya was 110 minutes.

The seating discouraged me from leaving at all, though I would have loved a beer or three, so I sat there for the full 200 minutes trying to keep my blood flowing to my feet.

A play that long was going to have some ups and downs and several parts of Vanya did not work for me. Some of the humour, such as the constant retuning of a guitar, seemed out of place. Some of the emotional heights were reached too quickly, especially in the first part, and what was probably meant to be reaction came across as over reaction. The stage slowly rotated which I hated in Streetcar Named Desire and which I hated here too. Vanya was renamed Jimmy for no apparent purpose and to no great effect. The ending was far too slow.

Fortunately there was much that did work, and worked very well.

The play revolved around three strong characters all played superbly. Paul Rhys as Vanya took most of the credits though, for me, he was outshone by Tobias Menzies as the doctor, being in Game of Thrones probably helped here, and my star of the show was Vanessa Kirby as the young married woman, Elena, who they both fancied. It was only afterwards that I realised that I had seen her, and had loved her, before in another Chekhov, Three Sisters at the Young Vic. She was the vivacious centre of the story and beautiful with it, which made the three men's desire for her completely believable.

At some point they sung Lust for Life which seemed entirely appropriate and that idea may also have been borrowed from Three Sisters.

One of the techniques used that I thought worked well was that each of the main characters spoke directly to the audience at some point and, to reinforce that that was different from the main play, they stood down from the stage to do so.

I found Uncle Vanya to be something of a curate's egg but with enough good bits in it to keep me enthralled and entertained. I will continue to see Chekhov plays but am less sure about going back to the awkward Almeida.

Two Short Comedies by Anton Chekhov at the White Bear Theatre

My mission to see every performance of a Chekhov play took me back to the White Bear Theatre in Kennington which I first went to to see Three Sisters just over a year previously. This time it was to see two short comedies, The Proposal and The Bear.

These were part of a double-bill, with separate tickets for each part, but a previous commitment with a cloud of gin and tonic meant that I could only get to the second half. I left the cloud in Borough at 8pm and from there it was a quick dash south two stops on the Northern Line to get to the White Bear. I got there in the gap between the two shows and so had a little time to settle down with a pint or Ordinary before moving into the theatre.

Skillful positioning within the bar meant that I was one of the first into the theatre and was able to claim a place in the middle of the front row.

In The Proposal an agitated man approaching middle age approached his neighbour to ask for his daughter's hand in marriage. The neighbour was agreeable but the man's agitation made the proposal a slow one and before it could be made a row erupted between them over a piece of land that both claimed that they owned. When that argument was quelled another one erupted over the relative merits of each other's dogs. The comedy came from their stupidity in having silly arguments when they were obviously a good match for each other.

The Bear covered similar territory with the same cast and similar results. This time the man called upon his neighbour to ask for a small debt to be paid urgently only to find her in widow's black for a husband who had died years previously. We soon learned that he had not been a good husband, he had had many affairs, but the widow was still feistily determined to carry her widowhood to her own grave. Both their tempers rise as the debt issue is not resolved, a duel is threatened and pistols are got. Faced with this fierce tide of mourning and anger the man falls in love. Again the comedy came from the stupidity of people and again I laughed quite a lot.

There were only three actors in the cast. Sylvie-Anne Taylor was wonderful as the two women who, between them, displayed a wide range of emotions and moved quickly between them. Marcio Mello was a convincing lover in both plays though his foreign accent seemed at times a little odd in a Chekhov scenario. Rufus Graham played the third man, the woman's father and then her manservant, with dignity and wit.

I had seen both plays before, though I did not know this until I saw them again, as part of Anton Chekhov's Vaudevilles at the Jermyn Street Theatre but that did nothing to diminish my enjoyment of seeing them this time. The comedy came from the way that the people interacted with each other rather than from any staged jokes that once heard would have lost their impact.

These were hardly Chekhov's major works but they still felt like Chekov and were well worth the miserly price of admission (£12).

After the performance I took advantage of not having to rush home to chat to some of the crew and to have another couple of pints of Ordinary. It was great to talk at length about theatre with other fans and I walked back to Vauxhall a very happy man.

The Three Sisters at The Cockpit Theatre was slow at times but always engaging

I do like my Chekhov but even I though that going to see The Three Sisters for the third time in eight months might be pushing it a bit. It wasn't.

My evenings was very busy at that time and there were a few plays that I wanted to see but had to miss due to lack of time and having to give priority to other shows. The Three Sisters was pretty high up my priority list and so I decided to see it on a day that I was working in London. Not only did that make the logistics easier but it also gave me a nice walk from Kings Cross to Marylebone, pausing for a coffee and a cereal bar in Marylebone Station.

There was a good, and a young, crowd there but they were not interested in the front row so I was easily able to grab my favourite spot. Once again I had forgotten just how low the seats are there and scared myself slightly as I fell down into my place.

This was a new translation of The Three Sisters, by Agnieszka Kennedy who also played Masha, and kept to the original story, unlike some previous versions that I had seen that had moved Moscow to London or had cut large parts out. This may have been my third Three Sisters n under a year but they had all been different adaptations.

The set was simple and effective. The front of the stage was a sitting room with a dining room at the back slightly raised. Some furniture moved around to make different spaces but this was more or less it.

On to that set poured a large and talented cast. One of the strengths of this version was the way that it made the most of all of the characters, even the lesser ones like the old housemaid who struggled with her many chores without a word of kindness from the family.

I tweeted at the time that to get Three Sisters right you have to get Masha right and @TCThreeSisters at @cockpittheatre did with @AgnieCKennedy sweet in the role, which I still think is fair. Life just happened to the other two sisters but Masha made things happen. It is a moot point as to whose tactics were the most effective in a story where (almost) everybody lost.

Other characters that I particularly liked were their brother Andrey who slipped sullenly into a downtrodden life, his wife Natasha who grew from a timid girl to a dominant woman, and Fyodor who loved his wife Masha desperately despite her actions. The only character I struggled to engage with was Masha's lover Aleksandr who started hesitantly and formally when he first met the family but failed to develop from there despite his relationship with Masha. The lack of passion in that relationship could have been a problem if it were not for all the other good things going on.

My only other minor gripe is that this was a very long play, we finished around 11pm, and while it was always engaging and never boring it did drag a little in the final third leading up to the dramatic endings. I probably felt this more that some there as I knew all too well what those endings were and so I had that sense of expectation that took a while to be fulfilled.

This version of The Three Sisters did what I wanted it to do. Not only was it entertaining but it showed me aspects of the play, particularly regarding the lesser characters, that I had not noticed before. It further stoked my interest in The Three Sisters and made me more likely to see another version when I next get the chance.

The Cherry Orchard at the Young Vic was gripping but missed the point

I do not like to miss Chekhov plays and as I managed to miss two Uncle Vanya's this year (one because it finished early and the other because I could not find the time to see it) I was pretty keen to see this acclaimed version of The Cherry Orchard at the Young Vic.

And I almost missed this one as well. I was very late booking and the only time I could find to see it was a Wednesday afternoon. I was very lucky as when I went online to book it there was a single seat in the second row (B28 for £35) so I grabbed that eagerly. Somebody up there obviously wanted me to go.

Being a mid-week matinee the audience was an odd mix of students and retired people with just a few people, like myself, somewhere in the middle. Being a matinee also meant no beers beforehand so I was able to time my travel to arrive about 15 minutes before the show started.

On entering the theatre I was surprised to see it laid out as a proscenium (traditional) theatre with all the seating to the front of the stage. I had been to the Young Vic several times before and while the layout was always different it usually had seating on three sides, i.e. a thrust stage.

There was nothing to see initially as a jet black blind hid the stage. There seemed little point in taking my usual "this is what I could see" picture as all I could see was black. I thought about taking a photo at other times but the staff were always sharp, a few people were caught trying to use their phones, and the black blind returned to hide the stage at the end too. I've settled for this picture found on the web as it more or less shows the view that I had. I guess that I was one row further back and about four seats to the left.

I had a comfy seat with a good view, which is just as well as the play was scheduled to run for two hours without a break. We actually got a break for a medical incident in the audience (I did say it was full of pensioners) but it was short and we stayed in our seats.

The Cherry Orchard had one broad theme, decline and renewal, that was played out through a sizeable cast who each faced the decline in their own way.

The range of characters used to tell the story was almost pantomimic with goodies, baddies and clowns. The main clown was Leonid, the matriarch's brother, who got carried away whenever he spoke, and knew it. He brought a smile to my face every time. Also clowning was the governess Charlotta, though I am not sure why she had to walk through the room naked after a swim.

The young servant Yasha was a very convincing baddie and, as so often happens in real life, he prospered. The matriarch, Madame Ranevskaya was the goodie and the main loser. Her goodness of heart was not matched by he financial acumen and she lost the family's money on a lavish lifestyle and imprudent loans.

A lot of attention was paid to portraying the individual characters and I felt that this was at the expense of the main theme. The production seemed to recognise this and it used mood music, such as used in film, to indicate the wood of the theme that was lost in the trees of the characters.

That said, the characters and their lives were absorbing and the two hours flew by. The thunderous reception at the end showed that this was a good Cherry Orchard, it was just not quite the Cherry Orchard that I wanted to see.

Trimmed but neat Three Sisters at the White Bear Theatre

This was my first visit to the White Bear Theatre in Kennington and my third time of seeing Three Sisters in the last two years. So I knew what to expect in some areas and had some surprises in others.

White Bear Theatre was conveniently close to Kennington Station in a part of London that I had bussed through several times but had never visited before. I found it a strange place and the best evidence for that was that the best option that I had for pre-theatre food was a prepacked sandwich from Costcutter (another first for me) which I ate on a dark bench in Kennington Park.

The pub was nice enough but it did not do food. It did do a nice pint of Young's Ordinary at the ridiculously low price of £3.05, I was paying £3.60 in Kingston the night before and thought that was reasonable. I celebrated by having a few through the evening, helped by the theatre's policy of allowing drinks in.

The theatre was "L" shaped with two rows of seats in the "L" and the stage in the rectangle formed by those two side. I was prompt enough to get a seat towards the middle of the front-row of the long side. I did not count the seats but I guess that there were around forty and they all looked to be taken.

At £14 the ticket price was ridiculously low too.

The first things I noticed was that we were in a British territory and not a Russian one and that we were in current times not the 19th century. This was the same transposition that the Southwark Theatre had gone for.

The biggest change took a while to dawn on me, this version was abridged. The story rattled along faster than I was used to and some characters were missing, notably the family maid who linked the two generations in the original story.

That was not a problem, I just tried to forget that this was Chekhov's Three Sisters and just watched the play on its own merits. And it had lots of merits.

Despite the cuts, many of the original themes remained with the three sisters and their brother going through some ups and downs, mostly downs, as they were buffeted by events mostly beyond their control.

The acting was much better than it has any right to be in a venue this small and that was a big factor in making the story engaging and believable. It was quite a large cast too as even cut to the core Three Sisters has nine significant roles. They all did well and the two that most caught my attention most were Annemarie Highmore as Emily/Masha and Nigel Fyfe as her older married lover Alexander.

As with the original, this Three Sisters ended with all three of them confronting significant set-backs (if you can call a death and a departure merely set-backs) and resolving to face the future positively. It's almost a happy ending.

This production of Three Sisters wrung all the emotion from the main themes in the original to make a dramatic and intense drama that thrilled a very happy audience of seasoned theatre goers.

A powerful Three Sisters at the Southwark Playhouse

It was Chekhov who first took me to the Southwark Playhouse with The Seagull in 2012 and it was Chekhov who took me back there this time to see Three Sisters. The same team were behind both productions and that was one of the attractions.

I had seen the marvellous version of Three Sisters at the Young Vic around the same time as I saw The Seagull but that was no barrier to seeing it again. I expected this version to be quite different (it was) and, besides, there is plenty of depth to Chekhov to justify a second viewing.

I also managed to maintain the tradition of seeing plays on their very last day.

It had been a long road to Southwark that had taken me via Brixton to Dulwich for some Hockney then on to a favourite restaurant (Brigade) at London Bridge before tracing the last few steps back to the theatre. I arrived in good time to grab a beer and possibly the last free seat in the bar area. It was busy.

The seat was conveniently close to the door through to the two studios so I was aware when the queue in had got sufficiently large for me to join it and so I was able to capture a preferred front-row seat.

This version of Three Sisters was set in the present day (the doctor read that day's newspaper to make the point) in some unnamed British Post-Colonial outpost where the sisters dreamed of being back in the London of their childhood.

Other than that it seemed like a fairly straight interpretation. The language was modern but not aggressively so and was close to my recollection of the previous version that I had seen.

The production was much simpler which helped me to differentiate the two performances, though there were some touches in this one that I felt were taken and adapted from the Old Vic production, e.g. the way that they sang Common People at the party.

With a simpler production the success or failure of the production was down to the cast and they did a fine job. Unfortunately the Southwark Playhouse Archive only lists the actors and does not say what roles they played, and I cannot be bothered to do the much research to find out so I can only make a few comments.

Paul McGann was masterful as the soldier who had to go home end and the woman he left behind, Masha, was played especially nicely by Emily Taaffe too (though some of the outfits she wore were a bit difficult to understand). In a large cast, the two other sisters and their sister-in-law also stood out. And those that did not shine as much were at least competent and often better. This was a fine cast.

There were some flaws in the updating that other reviewers have pointed out but these did little to lessen either the characterisations or the story which the play is all about. Though that did beg the question as to the point of updating the play rather than just, for example, relocating it; there is nothing particularly unusual about the period or the location that makes the original version difficult to understand.

The build-up to the endings and then the endings themselves were powerful and dramatic. I knew what was coming but was still swept up in the moment. Three Sisters is a great play and this production played to its strengths.

Anton Chekhov's Vaudevilles at the Jermyn Street Theatre

I nearly missed this treat.

I got an email promoting something else at the Jermyn Street Theatre and when I went on to their website I found this. The Anton Chekhov name would have been enough for me to book it and this also had Michael Frayn's name too. I feel a sense of local loyalty towards Frayn, he lives just up the road and went to the same local school as my younger son, and he writes good plays as well.

I was a little surprised that the theatre had allocated seating (it did not the last time that I was there) but pleased that my seat was in the middle of the front row (A5). Even more so as the Indian meal took longer than hoped/expected and I did not get to the theatre until about ten minutes before the show started by which time the place was pretty full.

This was a different Chekhov from the one that I am used to that usually ends with a gun shot off stage and the former peasants moving in to the family mansion.

This was funny. Very funny and funnily done.

There were, I think, four short plays and two short stories.

In the first a famous writer was interrupted by a woman who had written a play that she wanted to read to him. All of it. Then. He made excuses but she was determined and refused to leave or to let him leave on any of his pressing appointments. He got more and more desperate and finally resorted to extreme measures.

In another a man inherited a country estate (familiar Chekhov territory) and went to visit his new neighbour only to find her a widow dressed in mourning and determined to spend the rest of her life in her house, wearing black and thinking about her husband, even though we learnt that he had not been good or faithful to her. The visitor is attracted by her feisty determination to maintain her way of life, falls in love with her and proposes.

In the final play, a man called to ask a young lady to marry him having first cleared it with her father. Before he proposed they made small talk about their respective estate and he said that he had plans for a wood only for her to say that the wood was part of her estate. They had a furious row. Then they had another furious row over whose dog was the better. The father then appears, the lady learnt the purpose of the man's visit, her mood softened and she agreed to his proposal. And then they rowed about the dogs again.

It was all very charming and wonderfully acted. I laughed a lot at the pig-headed and pathetic characters and their silly words.

Platonov at the Arcola Theatre

I discovered the wonderful Arcola Theatre in Dalston just two years ago with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. I fell in love with both and have been back to the Arcola a dozen times since and have travelled across London for more Chekhovs.

So when the Arcola announced that they were putting on Platonov, also known as Sons Without Fathers, I was in quick to get my ticket.

I was not disappointed. Nor was I just happy. I was deliriously entertained.

The good times started before the play started. This was another carefully crafted day and I arrived in Dalston (a simple hop on the London Overground from Richmond) in plenty of time to do some local exploring and to have lunch.

Immediately opposite Dalston Kingsland station is the vibrant Ridley Road Market. The unusual fruits and vegetables were the most interesting things on show closely followed by some of the colourful cloths. I also took the opportunity to revisit the Eastern Curve Garden before heading back to the Arcola to eat.

Relaxed, fed and watered I descended in to the bowels of the theatre to claim a front-row seat.

The set was suitably sparse and brutal. The feeling was of metal rather than wood and that added to the bleakness.

The large cast includes Platonov, a thirty-something teacher, his wife, her brother (the expected Doctor), a local gangster, a young man from a newly rich family, an upper-class and classy widow and a young married couple.

The play is driven by Platonov's dalliances with women who all seem to be besotted by him and three of them pursue him vigorously. He is too weak and confused to make a decision that he can stick with, other than to have the most fun that he can at that moment.

Along the way the doctor drinks a lot, as does Platonov, the gangster is commissioned to kill Platonov but offers to do it for free, lots of discussions are had about how the post-revolution (or post Glasnost) world has just created a new class of wealthy people but has delivered nothing to the working-class.

The great, and overwhelming strength of the play is the rich mix of characters and their interactions.

To work, a play like this needs a good cast and this one is blessed with an excellent one. The least effective actor (in my opinion) was still reasonable and the best (also in my opinion) was the young wife who wanted to run away with Platonov and was astonishingly good and I could not help but share her pains.

There is an ending, which I won't reveal (it is Chekhov so you can guess) and that brings closure to the mess that has gone on before but it is that near three hours of mess that is the play's delight as the mood swings violently through drunken revelry, deep passion, menace, despair, jealously, anger and more.

In case you did not guess, I absolutely loved it. Another big tick in the boxes marked Arcola and Chekhov.

Longing at the Hampstead Theatre

My first visit to the Hampstead Theatre was prompted by the names Greig, Glen and Chekov.

Tamsin Greig has been in many good things including Black Books, Love Soup, Green Wing and The Archers. Iain Glen is now a major star thanks to Game of Thrones. Chekhov wrote a few classic plays, all of which I like.

Hampstead Theatre is bit of a star too. Built in the sixties it is comfortable and well laid out. The auditorium seats 300 people but still feels intimate and cosy, and there is a bright welcoming reception area with a cafe.

The theatre is also conveniently placed next to Swiss Cottage underground station and that is not too far from the cutely named Finchley Road & Frognal station on the London Overground, where I arrived from Richmond.

Longing is something of a cheat but an acceptable one. Chekhov wrote only a few plays but dozens of short stories and Longing is the merger of two of these. The joins are obvious, i.e. there are clearly two stories being told,  but they are sewn together neatly and effectively.

In familiar Chekhov territory we find a Russian country estate that has fallen on hard times.and he family face ruin, largely due to the husband's unwise investments. Tasmin Greig, a doctor (another Chekhov regular), is visiting the family and they are joined by Iain Glen another childhood friend who is now a successful Moscow lawyer. The family hope that he can find some way out of their predicament.

He tries to help and while he does so feelings develop between him and two of the girls. The possible love story between Tasmin and Iain is the main story.

The summer house Glen is living in needs painting and so we are introduced to the two men whose job this is. One is a young man who is entitled to a higher station in life but who wants to live as a labour and to do proper work.

He is thwarted in this by being engaged to the coarse daughter of a newly-rich man (John Sessions) who intends to buy the estate.

The young man discovers that one of the daughters heard some of his poetry once and he begins to think that perhaps his impending marriage is not what he wants. This relationship is the second story.

The two stories share the theme and Longing is a good summary of that.

This is Chekhov so we get lots of examples of the tensions between the classes, town and country, and new and old money. What is missing though is the expected gravitas of decline. Indeed we get the opposite and the financially inept husband is cheery throughout. Like Billy Bunter he is always expecting something to turn up.

I liked the play a lot. Not as much as a genuine Chekhov but quite a lot none the less. What I liked even more was the acting. The two stories required a few strong characters to carry them and this it had. Everybody in the cast played their part very well and the rousing reception from the sold-out house was well deserved.

Longing was well thought out and delivered. Everything from the theatre to the set to the direction to the acting worked and worked well. The script was good too, it was just a shame that it had the Chekhov name to try to live up to.

The Seagull at the Southwark Playhouse

I seem to have acquired the habit of seeing plays on the last day of their runs, and so it was for The Seagull at the Southward Playhouse.

That is mostly down to my lack of planning so I get to hear about good productions only once they are well in to their runs and my frequent working away means that my trips to the theatre are confined to the weekend, which is when runs end.

I wanted to see The Seagull as it completed by recent run of the Chekhov classics, was getting good reviews (usually four stars, not that I approve of star rating schemes) and it was an excuse to try a new theatre.

The Southwark Playhouse sits in the shadow of the Shard just to the east of London Bridge Station. This is office land but there is enough life their at the weekend to justify keeping most of the restaurants open, including a rather splendid bistro more-or-less across the road from the theatre.

It was free seating at the theatre so I got in their promptly only to find it in bit of a shambles. There were two shows on in the theatre that night which meant that the bar was too busy to make it worth fighting for a drink and the queue for the show that started first blocked the bar and the passageway to the main theatre. We managed to form a reasonably orderly queue only to discover that another one had formed out of the front door so we were not as close to the front as we though.

Somehow I still managed to get the hoped-for seat in the front row.

This was a modern adaptation though, not having seen the original, it was hard to discern much modern about it. A more experienced theatre goer (more on that later) told me during the interval that the only difference was that they had swapped references to Moscow for London.

The Seagull is familiar Chekhov territory, put a diverse group of people in to a familiar domestic situation, add a little pressure, and mix. Some of the characters are reused from other Chekhov plays, such as the teacher who is disappointing husband and the old ineffective doctor.

The pressure comes from an cross-generation (for those times) romance and the young man frustrated by another's success.

Along the way a seagull gets shot, gets stuffed and becomes a metaphor.

This is Chekhov so emotions sway and the mood is turbulent. There is laughter, surprises, angst and it does not end well for everybody.

I liked the production and the large cast were superb. Matthew Kelly was the only name known to me and he had just a cameo role as the Paracetamol prescribing doctor.

This was a Seagull well worth making the effort to see.

The icing on the cake was spotting Dudley Sutton in the audience, most of whom were far to young to have seen him in Lovejoy let alone any of his earlier works like Under Milk Wood, and carefully manoeuvring a conversation with him at the interval - he was the source of the Moscow/London comment made earlier.

Despite the chaos in the queue and the bar before the show this was another superb evening that demonstrated just what London Theatre can do off the west-end when it puts its mind to it.

Three Sisters at the Young Vic

Chekhov seems to be back in fashion at the moment, and that suits me.

Three Sisters is one of his four last plays which are the four that he is best known for. The Young Vic's performance had got good reviews but the run clashed with my late Summer holiday so I ignored it for a while. Then the run was extended and I took the plunge. Even then I was not able to get there until the last day.

I like the pre-theatre area at the Young Vic though you usually have to fight to get a seat. I managed to find one upstairs. Unfortunately they do not sell bean coffee from the upstairs bar so I had to have a beer.

Taking my seat in the front row it was apparent that this was going to be a modern production. The square performance are was filled with grey tables that made a raised stage. There were a couple of props and that was it.

Gradually we are introduced to the cast and the three sisters took up positions around the edge of the stage, i.e. close to the audience. Again the modernity was blatant. The language of the translation was contemporary and reasonably fresh and, sitting almost in my lap, Masha sang Bowie's Golden Years to herself.

Olga, the eldest sister, is a teacher and a spinster by accident. Masha married young and regrets it. Irina wants to escape the rural home and return to Moscow where she had lived as a small girl.

Add to the mix some local soldiers, a doctor who has forgotten everything that he ever knew about doctoring, and ageing housekeeper, a geek brother and the bibmo who becomes his wife, and a few other local characters. It is a large and diverse cast.

The play is about an ending, as common theme with Chekhov. The ending here is the departure of the army that had been stationed there for some years.

Their departure takes the town back to rural solitude and has a direct impact on each of the sisters, and it is not a happy one.

It was vintage Chekhov.

This production was superb in all respect. The acting made the most of the diverse characters bringing out their differences while keeping them believable. We feel deeply for some, dislike others and find others amusing.

The staging was aggressively modern in a good way. This is not a safe production that lets the established script play out on its own. It adds energy and friction and, like a grain of sand in an oyster, it produces a pearl.

One scene summed it up. There is a party and somebody sits down at the piano to play a folk song. That turned out to be Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit that everybody sung along to with gusto pausing only to drink copiously. The atmosphere that created was exactly right.

After the ice cream break the plot themes developed in a downward spiral. There is a fire, a shooting, an affair, a large gambling debt and a broken clock.

The decay is emphasised as the tables that made up the raised stage are slowly removed one at a time. This, and all the other carefully planned parts of the staging and direction, made this a stunning production. It was easy to see why the run was extended and why it was sold out.

The Cherry Orchard at the Rose

Another gap in my cultural capital was plugged when I went to see Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at the Rose Theatre.

My only previous Chekhov I had seen was Uncle Vanya at the Arcola last year and that was certainly good enough to tempt me to see more of the same.

This time I was even organised well enough and early enough to get an aisle seat in the Row A.

There are some seats in the Pit in front of this (rows AA, BB, etc.) but the seat in front of me in AA was empty so I had a perfectly clear view of the reassuringly unfussy stage.

The scene is a old country house in Russia that is waiting for the return of the Lady of the house who has been having a bit of down-time in Paris that involved some sort of relationship that did not go too well.

We gradually meet the rest of the large cast that includes her brother, her children, some family friends and the staff of the house.

There is a lot going on. Relationships are being made and not made, money is borrowed, lent and given away, and hanging over all this is the scheduled auction of the house to clear the debts on it.

The main roles are played beautifully. Julia Hills stars and sparkles as the skatty Lady of the house who has trouble taking anything seriously.

The two main men, her brother and a former peasant who had worked for the family and then had made his fortune, were excellent too.

Together the three of them carried the play with their speech, mannerisms and expressions. It was wonderful to watch.

Less wonderful was the play itself which struggled to justify the five stars that the Guardian had given it. The characters were very entertaining and there was a lot of laughs along the way but we did not engage with them and when the story ends with the axes in the orchard (the non-stop moronic talkers next to me thought it was a clock) this was just another step in their complex lives rather than some sort of tragedy that it was probably meant to be.

The play ends not with a bang but with a whimper and that makes it a little bit of a disappointment, which is a shame because the journey to get there is a lot of fun and is skilfully delivered.

Uncle Vanya at the Arcola Theatre

Having seen, and thoroughly enjoyed, Chekhov in Hell at the Soho Theatre it only seemed sensible to go and see a Chekhov play, even if it meant going to Dalston to do so.

The Arcola Theatre is charm personified. It's an industrial brick shell in which some functional seating has been constructed. The entrance is through a cafe and bar area that looks as though it's run by a charity such is the lack of any attempt to make it look cool. They do a nice latte and cranberry flapjacks so that was my dinner sorted.

A few steps take you up to the theatre and then a lot more steps take you down again. I kept with tradition and bagged a seat in the front row preferring to watch the action close up and at the normal level rather than looking down on it.

The Arcola Theatre is a thrust, or three quarter round, stage. That is the audience are on three sides. I like stages like this where the action comes in to the audience and it's good to see so many theatres set up like this or something similar.

This closeness is particularly effective with emotional dramas, like Uncle Vanya.

The play shows us a summer on a Russian estate where Uncle Vanya is the manager to the owner, his dead sister's husband who now has a trophy bride about the age of his daughter. We also have some more estate workers and a visiting doctor. They spend the evening talking while we watch and soak up the emotion.

There is a lot of unhappiness in their lives and a phenomenal amount of unrequited love. The young bride does not love her husband but is loved by two others one of whom is loved by Uncle Vanya's niece. This is not the recipe for a happy ending.

But nor is the story that unhappy either. There are some good jokes along the way, some anger too, but the overall feeling is of disappointment of what life has to offer. Only their trust in a better afterlife gives them cause for rejoicing.

The suggestion that life is bad but it's all we've got has come up in several plays that I've seen recently but it's going to good plays that say that that proves that it's not true. If you see what I mean.

Uncle Vanya is superbly delivered on all counts and I could not fault it.

And the journey to/from darkest Dalston was easier than expected, I even bumped in to somebody that I know. I tried to bump in to another but he had left the bar at Dalston Roof Park a few days earlier!

The Arcola Theatre has joined my collection of small local theatres that I keep an enthusiastic eye on with the intention of going there fairly regularly.