16 Possible Glimpses

Peacock Theatre **

WHEN IRISH writers adapt the work of Anton Chekhov, they are not simply measuring one sad, eccentric culture against another, they are measuring themselves against a master. In her fragmented adaptation of the Russian writer’s life – presented in non-chronological snatches – Marina Carr is doing something similar. But this potted biography of a writer’s life and legacy is really a meditation on writing itself, departing from Carr’s dark rural mythologies and urban polemics to expand her own techniques.

In a revealing exchange, Chekhov (Patrick O’Kane) asks Tolstoy (Gary Lilburn), “Do you think the world cares that we can’t express ourselves as eloquently as we once could?” It seems less a reflection of the decline of writing, than an explanation for the play’s flatly demotic dialogue, which sometimes rises to the pitch of soap opera. “I hope someone breaks your heart someday,” says Chekhov’s ill-treated muse Lika (Deirdre Mullins). “That’s assuming you have one!”

Indeed, when Chekhov and Tolstoy conclude that “writing is basically mathematics”, one wonders if Carr is deliberately undercutting the philosophy and pith of towering figures with banality, or merely writing by numbers herself.

Director Wayne Jordan’s production seems uncertain, distracting itself with complex design and thickening the suspicion that if the play has little to say, it will find many ways to say it. Hugh O’Conor’s elegant video, often simultaneously projected on a rear screen and across a diaphanous down-stage scrim, folds the characters into an appropriate palimpsest of memories and the present. To achieve it, though, cast members scuttle around with boom mics and digital cameras, distractingly in thrall to the stagecraft of British theatrical innovator Katie Mitchell, with limited payoff. Rather than express Chekhovian inner action, the close-ups look hammy, where only Cathy Belton’s enjoyably ravishing Olga Knipper allows herself a wink at the conceit.

Chekhov, consumptive and priapic, may come off as wheezing misogynist but Carr also uses him as a periscope into the nature of writing and destiny. Here, the real and fictive interweave, Chekhov drawing from his life to create his characters, his characters altering his life. With arch subtlety, Jordan has Chekhov and his family assume the destinies of his fictitious ones, sometimes craftily underscored by Naomi Wilkinson’s costume changes. Again, glib dialogue lets it down (“Did I follow your plot or are you following mine?” asks Lika) just as Will Irvine’s reappearing Reaper-like Black Monk seems a clumsy dramatic device on loan from The Seventh Seal. Such lapses in conviction, and a running time of twice the advertised length, suggest we might have settled for fewer glimpses and a longer, deeper gaze.

Runs until October 29th