Theatre in Review: Chekhov's First Play (Dead Centre/Irish Arts Center)Chances are, you've never seen the first play written by Anton Chekhov, and you won't see it at the Irish Arts Center either, no matter the title of the current attraction. There's a good reason for this: The original script, an unfinished, unwieldy five-hour drama discovered twenty years after the playwright's death, is widely considered to be unstageable; when it does turn up, it is in abridged, adapted form. In the mid-1980s, Michael Frayn turned it into the sex farce Wild Honey, which made a nice vehicle for Ian McKellen. David Hare's version, Platonov, cuts the running time by about 40%, as does Andrew Upton's The Present, which updates the action to the 21st century. All three versions share, at best, a kissing-cousin resemblance. The main joke in Dead Centre's so-called Chekhov's First Play, is that we're getting the Platonov script with annotations. The audience members are outfitted with binaural headsets and a figure known as The Director (Bush Moukarzel, who did, in fact, co-direct this production with Ben Kidd) informs us that since the original text is a bit of a mess and not really very good, he will provide a running commentary "to explain what's going on, what it's about, and why you should like it." Well, fair play, as the Irish say, although most of The Director's comments are trivial when not veering wildly off-topic. When an actor lights up, we're told, "There's a lot of smoking in this play. They didn't know about cancer." Later, The Director, says, "Chekhov originally sent this play to Moscow's leading actress Maria Yemerlova, wanting her to play the part of Anna Petrovna. But she thought the play was terrible and rejected it. I also had lots of actresses turn down this part. I don't know why." And, following a mildly risqué remark, he notes, "A rare cock joke from Chekhov there," before mulling over that the fact that, in the 1990s, the world's supply of Viagra was manufactured in Ireland. The Director also points out the many cuts he has made to the text, eliminating, among other characters, an entire cadre of servants. Soon, his commentary becomes a storm of nitpicking about an overplayed bit here and an underplayed line there. He goes ballistic when an older actor forgets his lines, causing three pages of text to be dropped. And he cops to having slept with one of the actresses, adding, "I can't even remember the sex." Some of this is fun, even if Anne Washburn's comedy 10 Out of 12, seen at Soho Rep in 2015, made sharper use of the audience-eavesdropping conceit. One problem is purely technical and easily solved: The combination of actors, sound effects, and commentary is delivered at a level that quickly becomes assaultive. A preshow soundcheck sequence mentions nothing about a volume button and my fumbling attempts are finding such an item were unsuccessful. About thirty minutes in, I was removing my headset for seconds at a time, just to get a little relief. In any case, Chekhov is abandoned, as the action moves toward a general onstage breakdown: Fat suits and makeup are removed, an actress suddenly goes topless, another takes a sledgehammer to Andrew Clancy's set, and a giant wrecking ball flies in and is set aflame. The much-discussed, but unseen, Platonov, arrives in the form of a preselected audience member (following directions delivered to her headset), serving vodka shots to a company seemingly undergoing a collective nervous collapse. There are two ways of looking at this controlled chaos: On its simplest level, the piece -- its authorship credited to Dead Centre -- is about the loss of creative control, as an apparently well-drilled production takes on a self-destructive life of its own. Looked at another way, it measures the transition between the extreme naturalism of Chekhov's theatre, with its endless trips to the samovar, and the fragmented consciousness and anxiety of today's avant-garde performance styles. There may also be a larger context: The cast members veer between playing their assigned characters and talking about themselves, referencing Google, student loans, and voiceover jobs in a rush of commentary that also alludes to many ills of modern Irish life, including an unstable post-2008 economy and a rising consumer mentality. Many of these are familiar from We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole's magisterial history of modern Ireland. How compelling is all this? Sadly, not very. The humor of the first half is rather mild, and the lengthy onstage falling apart is surprisingly decorous in its effect. If Chekhov's First Play is meant to shock or unsettle, it falls wide of the mark. Indeed, you may find yourself asking if you haven't seen something similar at the Wooster Group or Mabou Mines; let's face it: Deconstruction is so 1980s. There are some diverting moments, for example when a delivery guy toting an order of Chinese food is mistaken for the Angel of Death. And the entire company performs with commitment -- whether reciting Chekhovian lines, stripping, or executing disco dance moves -- and I'd like to see them all in other productions. The design credits are solid. Clancy's set is engineered to take an unholy amount of abuse. Saileóg O'Halloran's costumes could be neatly slipped into just about any straightforward Chekhov production. Stephen Dodd's lighting deftly tracks the changes in mood onstage. Jimmy Eadie and Kevin Gleeson could make a major improvement in the production by simply modifying the headset sound a few decibels. Chekhov's First Play delivers a shock at the finale, when The Director returns for a bloody denouement. (You know what they say about Chekhov and guns.) Before this, he muses, "I wonder will this voice ever stop? This voice in my head. This commentary, commenting on everything. Will it ever go away? It doesn't even sound like me. How will I get out of my head?" I know just how he feels. --David Barbour 
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