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Literally taking a wrecking ball to history, Dublin theatre company Dead Centre’s play asks what we can get from the kind of century-old plays London’s theatres love to call ‘timely’ or ‘prescient’, even though their protagonists wear corsets, sip tea from samovars, and would probably have screaming hysterics at the sight of a smartphone.
It’s theoretically a staging of Chekhov’s first play ‘Platonov’, which he wrote at the tender age of 19, and which centres on an over-educated ‘Hamlet’ type hero that all the other characters endlessly obsess over. Audience members watch an old-school historical dress production while wearing headphones that play a kind of director’s commentary by Bush Moukarzel. His voice is faux-naive, smug and teasing, painstakingly explaining who everyone is and how we should interpret the ‘themes’ as they emerge: property, unfulfilled potential, longing. But he quickly gets overwhelmed by the task of explaining Chekhov’s convoluted, sub-plot ridden story, and by the incompetence of his actors. And things start to get messy.
I don’t really want to spoil what happens next, because the joy of this play is watching it reel out of Moukarzel’s grasp and transform into something dizzyingly strange. But it’s probably fine to say that the boundaries between past and present come crashing down, and that late nineteenth-century Russia collides with modern-day Dublin, a place wracked with its own concerns over property and debt.
Wearing headphones gives ‘Chekhov’s First Play’ an astonishing feeling of intimacy - the voices, soundscapes, and occasional Miley Cyrus banger that trickle into them make you feel like you’re alone, even as the stage fills with crowded chaos. Mouzarkel and his hero Platonov blur into one, staggering across the stage in a state of deep existential gloom. ‘Chekhov's First Play’ is something special: a dusty play made diamond-sharp by the weight of a century's worth of failures and thwarted creative longings