SOURCE: “Shakespeare for Smaller Forces,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 1997, p. 18.

In the following review, Reynolds praises Hare's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov.

The 1887 Moscow premiere of Ivanov, the first full-length play Chekhov completed, was famously shambolic. Actors taking the parts of drunks had prepared themselves so well that there was much unrehearsed upsetting of furniture. Chekhov had difficulty recognizing his own play, something compounded by the actor playing Shabyelski: “Kiselevsky, of whom I was hoping a lot, didn’t get one sentence right—literally not one. …” This débâcle may partly explain Chekhov’s later dismissals of Ivanov. His disparagement of his own play was matched by his scorn for most of the characters in it. The playwright, in his late twenties, looked down his nose at his thirty-five-year-old hero: “He hasn’t grown a decent moustache yet, and he’s already laying down the...