Review: Ivanov

ANTON CHEKHOV’S WAX MUSEUM IS BOILING

Hungarian master director Tamás Ascher turned Ivanov into a new position

In the Helsinki City Theatre’s repertoire, this performance is a bright gem, a classic, but not a classic. On the contrary, the Hungarian
Guest guidance by Tamás Ascher
Anton Chekhov’s
Ivanov erases the clichés of the Chekhov tradition with a big broom. It will be clean.
We see a drama that tears apart to comedy, chillingly rough and direct. It is played out without lace lace, glass veranda or the nostalgic decadence of the rural nobility. The grand piano is also badly out of tune.


The owl does not scream In the taiga of Central Russia, but in people’s heads. The garden of the Ivanov farm has changed
Zsolt Khell’s staging as a yellowishly defeating and worn-out agency. For a moment, I even thought it remotely resembled the lobby of the City Theatre.
Instead of the sun, pale fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling. The furniture piled up in a stack is like from the corner of a flea market and, like the costumes and hairstyles, represents the different decades of the 20th century. Skilful light and sound work adds to the waxiness of the dead world.
The tax and administrative officials in the play, the impoverished count or the country doctor have reason to be anxious. In this environment, not only Anna, who is dying of a lung disease, has breathing problems. There is no direction in life, and there is no beauty in love.


They are overhuman, extra in their own lives and in each other’s lives. The direction draws very sharp and precise outlines for the play. The performance dismantles the characters’ dependencies into a grotesque circle game, in which the relationship between a man and a woman begins to resemble more
August Strindberg’s relationship bitterness than Chekhov, which is usually read with empathy.
The direction is so clearly thought out and sliced that the scenes are able to go from full laughter to emotionally cold cynicism without losing their logic! The milieu supports the aesthetics of horror and ugliness, which is also sticky to the human mind.
One of the author’s early plays,
Ivanov’s title character already bears the traits of his later uncles Vanya. He is many degrees more black and white and vicious, in this interpretation.

Rauno Ahonen is the terrible Ivanov, Nietzschean gloomy, at the same time self-pitying and emotionally dead. Ahonen interprets the handsome arc from a nihilist who abandons his wife to a self-destructive penitent. The wedding preparations and death touch us in the same stage image.


The visitor’s character direction has worked wonders in other ways as well.
Tom Wentzel’s Foolish Count,
Pertti Sveholm’s money-rich scumbag,
Jonna Järnefelt , a pale abandoned wife, or
Pihla Penttinen’s fast-paced young people are a delicious shot. The whole ensemble is like a group of crazy and helpless people gathered in a ragged family picture. Hilariously symbolically hits the essentials
Matti Rasila as a servant rushing in through different doors, on whose silver tray nothing can stand.
The director’s arrangement cleanses the emotional flow of the text. The whining for pity is minimized, and Ivanov doesn’t shoot himself in the end. He is suffocating in his wrong choices and in himself.
We are very close, in the middle of Chekhov’s special ability to write a tragedy and call it a comedy.