SOURCE: “A Short History of Abdication,” in New Yorker, December 1, 1997, pp. 94-5.

In the following review, Lahr offers a commendatory estimation of Hare's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play Ivanov.

As the lights come up on David Hare’s crisp adaptation of Ivanov (at the Vivian Beaumont), which Chekhov wrote in 1887 at the age of twenty-seven, we can make out the inevitable Russian birch trees and the inevitable murk of the Russian vastness. The landscape, which enforced a special quality of brutalizing boredom and agitation in provincial nineteenth-century life, is the backdrop—and perhaps even the shaping power—for what Chekhov saw as a defining national trait. “Russian excitability has one specific quality: it is quickly followed by fatigue,” he wrote to his friend and publisher Suvorin. “A man has hardly jumped off the school bench when he takes up, at fever heat, a burden above his strength: he...