In the small, dimly-lit swimming pool of an anonymous and respectable hotel on Grassmarket, a group of kids are playing around, splashing at each other between ribaldry and ennui, reading fashion magazines on a deck chair. Indie rock plays in the background. Everyone is young, attractive, and in a swimming suit. Re-translated, adapted and directed by Alexa Christopher-Daniels, this is the particularly brave version of Checkov’s Ivanov presented at the Edinburgh Festival by the company Gems of Mazal - and it certainly is full of brilliant ideas.

First of all the setting and venue: Checkov’s indecisive and morally disputable characters become the protagonists of a swimming pool party - the sunglasses say 1980s, but the languid cynicism says 1990s. Suddenly, that characteristic habit that everyone has in Russian literature of discussing the moral and social stance of everyone else as soon as they leave the room turns out to be closer to bitching and gossiping than philosophy. Anna becomes the daughter of a rich Israeli family who made their money in real estate, rather than simply a Jewish heiress, and Dr Lvov becomes Dr Eugenia Lvova, which brings about a refreshing ambiguity in her love for Anna, but also twists the disrespectful and dismissive way she is silenced by Nicholas Ivanov (here simply Nico).

There is a certain amused enthusiasm à la Baz Lurhmann behind all this: the beautiful and damned, the young and wealthy, in their trunks and bikinis, walking glamorously towards tragedy. Alexandra Batiste-Wegner heightens the feeling by looking, just perceptibly, like Claire Danes, and Oliver Wood is often the strongest presence on the scene as both Shabelsky and Paul Lebedev.

Yet, for all its promise and glitter, the party feat is not quite pulled off. First of all, there are the logistic problems, acoustics being the worst of them. The actors’ splashing around confuses and refracts their voices, and the echo of the room does not help. This inflicts considerable harm to the charming idea of the swimming pool setting. Secondly, we career through the play at breakneck speed, and in only one hour everything has been said and done, Anna is dead, Ivanov to follow, we are back out in the cold Edinburgh night: while the production would have suffered just as much from being dragged on to a more traditional length, this mini-marathon is bewildering, and it syncopates our feelings for the characters to a much more simplistic and arbitrary distribution of sympathies and antipathies.

Ivanov is an immensely difficult character to play, arguably even harder than Hamlet because the former is explicitly and almost postmodernly aware of the latter. The wonder of Checkov’s text is that up until that very last shot, and even then, we have no idea what we are supposed to make of him. Stephen McLeod looks the part, for this particular production - he could equally be straight
out of Bret Easton Ellis or Orange County -, but he ends up sounding more like a spoiled and selfish brat than like the depressed, lazy, but educated and probably very honest protagonist of Checkov’s play. This is the easy road to take but not the most clever, nor the most appreciative.

It is a further proof of Alexandra Christopher-Daniels’ courage that Gems of Mazal were also staging The Merchant of Venice during the festival, in the same venue. However, in spite of the inspiring enthusiasm that is clearly at free play here, the one worst defect of this production is that it worries considerably about itself, but not enough about its audience, and the acoustics; the high-speed plot rendering and the rough approximation of the protagonist all testify to this. Ivanov should be enjoyable not only for those who have previously read or seen Ivanov, and not only for those who can knowingly smile at the choice of Nick Cave’s ‘Your Funeral, My Trial’ as soundtrack. Ultimately, this lack of consideration turns what could have been an inventive showcase of new talents into an entertaining but confusing evening at the pool.

Run over