'Anton Chekhov’s first play was a sprawling, unstructured epic but it marked out the style and themes he would return to in his later masterworks from The Seagull to The Cherry Orchard. It remains a mysterious, unpolished gem.
'The manuscript, left unpublished until almost two decades after Chekhov’s death, lacked a title. Over the years it has inspired various adaptations – Wild Honey, Fatherlessness, The Disinherited –but it is most commonly referred to as Platonov, the name of the man at its centre. And yet, the play has always contained another extraordinarily rich and complex character – that of Anna Petrovna.
'Taking on these roles are the fearsome talents of Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh. Irish director John Crowley, renowned for his work on the West End and Broadway, brings his lean and precise theatrical vision. And, as with his 2010 adaptation of Uncle Vanya, Andrew Upton lends his distinctive voice, brimming with vitality, to this tale of yearning, vodka and shattered dreams.' (Production summary)
Presented by Sydney Theatre Company and UBS. World premiere: Sydney Theatre 4 August - 19 September 2015.
Director: John Crowley.
Designer: Alice Babidge.
Lighting Designer: Nick Schlieper.
Cast: Anna Bamford, Cate Blanchett, Andrew Buchanan, David Downer, Eamon Farren, Martin Jacobs, Jacqueline McKenzie, Brandon McClelland, Marshall Napier, Susan Prior, Richard Roxburgh, Chris Ryan, and Toby Schmitz.
To appear on Broadway 8 January 2017.
' 'Remember', wrote Peter Carey in his 2003 novel 'My Life as a Fake', 'this is the country of the duck-billed platypus. When you are cut off from the rest of the world, things are bound to develop in interesting ways'. Well, yes, of course 'things' are bound to 'develop'. But what does 'interesting' mean? The arrival on Broadway of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) adaptation of Anton Chekhov's unnamed and unpublished text as 'The Present' is indeed 'interesting', in the way Peter Carey almost always suggests in his work: 'interesting' in that socially discounted way that reduces culture to its banalities while amplifying a kind of Antipodean inadequacy.' (Publication abstract)