Theatre review: Chekhov Shorts

Published on Thursday 31 March 2011 20:36

CHEKHOV SHORTS BRUNTON THEATRE, MUSSELBURGH ***

This programme of short Chekhov plays, presented by the Kent-based European Arts, offers a pleasingly warm, human and welcoming experience to audiences in small-scale touring venues across the UK. Chekhov felt that his short plays were lightweight nonsense, and in a sense he's not far wrong. Of the five short plays that make up this two-hour show, two feature fairly unflattering conventional caricatures of female characters – the domineering wife and the pretty young widow who doesn't know her own mind; and one of the others, Swan Song, is about an old actor on the point of retirement.

With Chekhov, though, there's always a little more to it than that: a touch of poetry here, an affectionate satirical insight into the Russian psyche there, and often that deep, insistent awareness of the Russian landscape that made Chekhov one of the world's early environmentalists. In romping swiftly through familiar classics like The Evils Of Tobacco – in which a henpecked husband is distracted from his lecture on the wicked weed by a litany of complaint against his wife – and The Bear and The Proposal, which both feature country neighbours fighting their way towards a faint possibility of married bliss, Jonathan Kemp's three-strong company maintain a relentlessly superficial air of bourgeois jollity, often nervously overplaying the comic business – and the stereotypes – rather than letting the texts speak for themselves. In the end, though, they deliver these well-shaped little plays with a spirit and industry that is hard to resist.