colinfirth.info - the aFirthionado archive

THEATRE: Benedict Nightingale has his doubts about a Russian classic

Pique fails to hit the heights

Griboyedov's bitter comedy is almost as well known in Russia as Gogol's Government Inspector, which it predates by 12 years; but it does not travel so well. One reason is that the plot is flimsier and the characters and their doings are less fun.

Another is that the play's satiric targets seem more local. And a third is that its colloquial witticisms and scathing rhymes cannot easily be smuggled across national frontiers. They tell me that any decent Russian dictionary of quotations contains 60-odd snippets from the play. For all its verve and dash, I cannot see Anthony Burgess's adaptation forcing the editors to update their British counterparts.

The title has variously and somewhat clunkily been rendered in English as Woe From Wit, Wit Works Woe, and The Misfortune of Being Clever. Though Burgess has subtitled his version (sponsored by AT&T) The Importance of Being Stupid, he is surely right to opt for Chatsky, since the play is a prolonged excuse for that gentleman to fling about in high-minded pique, denouncing Moscow and all its works. What Alceste is to Moliere's Misanthrope, Jimmy Porter to Look Back in Anger, and Holden Caulfield to Catcher in the Rye, he is to Griboyedov's dramatic plaint; and almost more self-indulgently.

Tim Hatley's eccentric if striking set consists of towering brown panels which swivel to become the outside of a bedroom, a chaotically Kafkaesque office, or a ballroom crammed with fat guttering candles that look like stunted stalagmites. These are all parts of the house of a government bigwig called Famusov, in Dinsdale Landen's performance a ruttish go-getter and cynic who looks like Old Macdonald after a night at the pub and, unfortunately, tends to talk like a great, growling chorus of his farm-animals. If he had crammed some of Burgess's rhymes into the food-processor, and turned on the switch, they would
hardly be more incoherent.

Anyway, Famusov's daughter Sophie (a demure Jemma Redgrave) has fallen into the clutches of his secretary (Jonathan Cullen), a whey-faced creep with a predatory mind and a Gazza-like accent, both of which he obsequiously conceals. Enter her former suitor, Colin Firth's Chatsky, his all-purpose contempt in no way dented by a three-year absence from his home city. From education policy to the Russian literary critics; from philistinism to the fashion for all things French: nothing escapes his Leavis-like scrutiny and Lawrence-like ire.

Moreover, everyone conveniently justifies his articulate scorn. Even the friend whose intelligence he once valued has been transformed by a fussy wife into a withered zombie, proof of the evils of Muscovite marriage. And so to the climax of Jonathan Kent's big, bold and in many ways impressive production, a fashionable party at which malicious gossips mingle with blimps and fools; twittering princesses wobble about the stage like tiny pink blancmanges; and all the guests end up crowded together in a venomous frieze, screeching insults at Firth's Chatsky, exuding his usual earnest charm. 

Perhaps remembering that Griboyedov was suspected of consorting with the Decembrists, and that his play could at first be distributed only in samizdat, Burgess emphasises Chatsky's radical anti-Tsarist sympathies more than he probably should.

He also seeks to show that, in his words, the piece "must always seem topical, since it is about the failed attempt of an intellectual rebel to indent the smug society in which he finds himself. But does that justify Chatsky's denunciations of churchmen who "persist in demonstrating God does not exist" and the prevalence of "vagrants shivering in cardboard boxes"?

To try too strenuously to equate the Russia of 1824 and the Britain of 1993 is to draw attention to the much greater differences. Still, there are moments, especially when a crazed nationalist starts praising a friend's brutish violence, when there may be parallels with Russia 1993. And even when that is not so, Burgess's script makes good, literate listening. How many translators could use a phrase like "debilitous iniellection" one moment, "what the hell" the next, and get away with both? Too few.

By John Gross

ALEXANDER GRIBOYEDOV'S satirical comedy Woe From Wit is one of the classics of the Russian theatre. 

Would we guess, if all we had to go on was the version which the Almeida Theatre is presenting under the title Chatsky? I think we would - but only just. Written in 1823, the play was promptly banned by the Tsarist authorities and only permitted to take its place in the repertoire some 40 years later. And it is easy enough to see why it gave offence. 

Chatsky, the hero, is partly a figure of his period, a romantic rebel, and partly the eternal plain dealer, determined to call things by their right name. He comes back to Moscow after an absence of three years abroad, doesn't like what he sees, and says so, loud and clear. His particular disenchantment is finding out that Sophie, the girl he loves, has been having a clandestine affair with his father's clerk, a smarmy and unscrupulous careerist. But his rage soon fans out to embrace everything else he dislikes about Moscow society - its snobbery, stupidity, hypocrisy, inane francophilia. 

I must admit that I found the first half of Jonathan Kent's production (which is sponsored by A T & T) somewhat sticky going. This is partly because of two less than satisfactory performances. Jemma Redgrave is simply too nice and too charming as Sophie - something stronger is called for; Dinsdale Lansden, as her father, defeats his own comic ends by spluttering too hard and generally overdoing things. Colin Firth, on the other hand, is an excellent sombre Chatsky; but at this stage we still wonder whether his Byronism isn't a self-regarding pose. 

In the second half, however, we see what he is up against. Sophie's father gives a party: the guests are a wonderful array of grotesques - rogues, humbugs, blimps, battleaxes, squealing adolescent princesses, mournful old wrecks. And though they are funny to start with, they soon become frightening, too, as the rumour that Chatsky is mad gathers force among them. 
There isn't much complexity in the situation - the author is at all times squarely behind Chatsky; but whatever the play lacks in light and shade, it makes up for in power. 
By the end of the evening the guests have become a potential lynch mob, and Chatsky's disgust only deepens when he is presented with an alternative: a drunken acquaintance tries to persuade him to come to a club where unorthodox opinions are debated, but the cure sounds as bad as the disease. 

At its best, the verse translation by Anthony Burgess displays the same kind of comic energy and bite. At other times, it can sound decidedly slapdash - though it would probably have fared better if its deliberate artificiality had been given equal emphasis throughout.