Platonov

James Noonan is an adjunct professor of English at Carleton University
and the author of Biography and Autobiography: Essays on Irish and
Canadian History and Literature.

This translation/adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Platonov originated
with the 1999 production of the play by the Toronto-based Soulpepper
Theatre Company. The adaptors—Susan Coyne, who played Sophia in that
production, and Hungarian director Laszlo Marton, who directed it—pay
tribute to the English translation of Ani Szamosi. This edition includes
eight black-and-white photographs from the 1999 production and a brief
foreword by Coyne.

Platonov is Chekhov’s second full-length play. Written in 1880–81
when Chekhov was still in medical school, it was discarded by its
author, only to be resurrected after his death in 1904. The original
version ran about seven hours on stage. Coyne and Marton wisely pared
the text to accommodate a three-hour running time.

Platonov anticipates Chekhov’s great plays: there is tragicomedy and
farce (as well as humanity), an analysis of nihilist figures of late
19th-century Russia, a preoccupation with lost ideals, and a tendency
toward dissoluteness among the principal characters. The title
character, described by one reviewer as “the nearest thing in drama to
a modern Everyman,” illustrates many of these characteristics.
Disillusioned and bitter, Platonov is a schoolteacher who can’t teach,
and a drunken, unfaithful husband to boot. In the end, it is
Platonov’s love life—he is involved with all four female characters
in the play—that does him in. While there is some tragedy in this, the
Coyne/Marton version emphasizes the comedy and the farce at the heart of
such experiences.

The language of the adaptation is lively, idiomatic, and contemporary,
with the occasional awkwardness and, in the printed text, some evidence
of careless proofreading. The 1999 production of Platonov was so
successful that Soulpepper remounted it the following year; that alone
is ample tribute to the young Chekhov’s discarded work.