Review: Ivanov

FINNISH “IVANOV” CAUGHT IN A TRAP

Maly Theatre and Helsinki City Theatre have been in close contact for a long time, as they are “related” in terms of artistic preferences.

Above all, both of these collectives are interested in the classics, and secondly, both of them consider a high level of acting to be one of the key achievements of cultural heritage. That is why Maly’s recent guest performance in Helsinki with Chekhov’s “The Seagull” was very popular with the audience, and when the Helsinki City Theatre arrived in Moscow with Chekhov’s “Ivanov”, the entire “cream” of the capital gathered to see how Finns interpret one of Anton Chekhov’s most enigmatic plays on his 150th birthday.

Tamás Ascher has already directed “Ivanov” at his home in Budapest and in 2008 he received the “Golden Mask” award for best foreign performance. So the Finnish performance repeats the director’s previous floor plan, but its tone is new, Ascher, tinged with the mentality of the Baltic Sea, takes the action to the 1980s, where everything is marked by moss, an inevitable longing that cannot be removed by any kind of joy. It is not for nothing that the director has chosen the Lebedev manor as the main setting, where the whole locality wants to be received, including Ivanov, who is rejected by the community, but here such low-mindedness, such jealousy and emptiness reign that every word they utter melts into the void of thoughtlessness. With astonishing psychological precision, the director builds Ivanov’s relationships with people he despises and at the same time cannot survive without them, because the mansion is in decay, there is no money and debts have to be paid. Rauno Ahonen plays a person who has fallen into a trap, which in principle does not depend on the time, today almost every one of us is in a similar psychic trap that eats away at the soul.

But Ivanov is proud, his conscience reproaches him. First of all, because of the sick wife, whom he has stopped loving, and the broken vase can no longer be glued together, and what could be done here… Oh, this Chekhovian theme: where does love disappear and how its place is filled with emptiness, but duty tells us to carry this cross. Few Russian actors are able to play this role, yet the Finnish Ivanov believes that the meaning of life is not in satisfying ambition and a comfortable existence, but in something else: being true to oneself and one’s own ideals. Perhaps this is too strong a statement, but for the Chekhovian hero, who usually stands at a crossroads, the theme of conscience and living according to its laws was central.

So what, do you tell everyone to shoot themselves, like Ivanov, says an agitated viewer who doesn’t get a happy ending, in which a widower marries a young Sashenka? From a practical person’s point of view, this is nonsense. And even according to the laws of Christianity, a person has no right to take his own life, but Chekhov, thanks to his medical profession, knew perfectly well that when a patient has lost his will to live and no longer believes in anything, no medication could help him. Thus, the Hungarian director, together with Finnish actors, reads Anton Pavlovich’s play as a contemporary drama about a superfluous person who lives according to the laws of honor in an honorless community.

(Finnish. Jukka Mallinen)