TOHK CSL mobile

Around Town

Art

Big Smog

Books

Film

Gay & Lesbian

Music

Nightlife

Restaurants & Bars

Stage

Chekhov, perhaps surprisingly,  once visited Hong Kong. In 1890, having traveled to Sakhalin Island in Siberia, he returned to Moscow via sea, and noted this of our onetime fair colony: “The first foreign port we reached was Hong Kong. It is an exquisite bay. The traffic on the sea was such as I had never seen before even in pictures; excellent roads, trams, a railway to the mountains, a museum, botanical gardens…”

 

It’s a jarring image – Chekhov, here. Almost as jarring as the idea that Chekhov, the man responsible for The Three Sisters and Ivanov, is funny. But, as Microfest’s Giles Burton is determined to show, Russia’s literary titan was quite the comedian.

 

The Sneeze is a collection of one-act comic vaudevilles (Chekhov called them ‘jokes’) originally translated and arranged by Michael Frayn. Burton, an international fringe theatre veteran, has directed it into an 80-minute long evening of six pieces, some of which run for as short as five minutes. “If you look at Chekhov as a master artist, and you think of The Three Sisters as this huge painting on the wall,” Burton explains, “These are like when the artist just comes up and does three brush strokes and creates a cartoon, and encapsulates something with that.”

 

Performed in English by a cast of five (Henry Coombs, Emilie Guillot, Candice Moore, Howard Paley, and Tammie Rhee), The Sneeze will be a welcome break from the run of weighty drama that’s been gracing our stages of late, and will likely be refreshing in its focus on character craft and theatricality.“I wanted to do something that was simply well-written and entertaining,” says Burton. “They are closer to farce than what we think of as Chekhovian. He takes rather over-the- top characters and puts them in ludicrous situations… in a very short play. So you get these intense character studies.”

 

Burton’s favourite short, Drama, is about a young woman who has written a very bad play, and who comes to a great writer to read it. The sketch is built around the author having to sit through this five-hour-long epic. What is smart about this piece, explains the director, is that it lampoons what people think Chekhov is about. Her play uses typically Chekhovian elements and character types, but, “it’s almost like she’s written a terrible version of Chekhov, and he’s taking the piss out of himself.”

 

Another play, The Sneeze, has no dialogue at all. It’s based on Chekhov’s early short story, The Death of a Civil Servant, and starts simply with “a very minor government official” at the theatre. He sneezes over a “very important government official”. And so begins the comedy, in which he tries to recover from his embarrassment. “How the character responds to something going wrong is the great thing about really good farce,” Burton observes, “It lets us see what the character is, and that’s what’s so funny.”

 

Descriptions of the other four shorts – The Bear, The Evils of Tobacco, Alien Corn, and the Inspector General – yield references to iconic British comedy Blackadder and something Burton refers to as “comedy racism”. But yes, admits the director, there’s an underbelly to Chekhov’s humour: “[The plays] have a darkness in that we see people crumble.” In the Evils of Tobacco, for example, the character gives us something incredibly sad about himself, just by delivering a lecture on tobacco. “What’s funny about it is the horror, that there’s this huge emptiness of people puffing themselves up and finding nothing below it,” Burton concludes. After all, “There’s that great theory that all comedy is suffering. We see other people’s suffering and it’s funny because we’re not in that situation.”

 

Samantha Leese