Fringe Theatre, Until Sat 10.

In a sparse setting of the Fringe theatre, director Giles Burton certainly makes good use of what he has. The play, a collection of 6 shorts from the Russian playwright, was upheld largely by great comic timing. Though the set was bare, the costumes added just enough flair, and Burton’s offstage directions worked to great effect in a theatre without wings.

The entire cast should be commended for their voice work; the various accents, from Henry Coombs’ lightly glottal Russian to Candice Moore’s Scottish brogue worked alongside a classical march soundtrack to set the mood of each piece.

 A slow start was due largely to actress Tammie Rhee’s hiccups with her lines throughout the first sketch, making it difficult to be fully involved in The Bear’s battle of the sexes. The shorts that followed were increasingly fast paced and engaging, and Rhee recovered in second skit Alien Corn with her dead on southern American accent portraying a (somewhat incongruous but still successful) Scarlet O’Hara type.

The five actors slid in and out of roles, including that of narrator, seamlessly. Breaking the fourth wall at times, these moments were well calculated and often lent to the shorts – most marked when Coombs transformed himself before our eyes into a miserable, ultimately comical, snuff snorting school master, thereby foretelling the story of how a young man can very quickly become an old one.

Coombs’ monologue in The Evils of Tobacco was one of the play’s best moments. The actor demonstrated with precision and poignancy Chekov’s point: people crumble, and they put themselves back together right in front of you on the stage of life. Another highlight was the silent headline short, The Sneeze, a masterfully executed and very funny piece of physical theatre by all five actors.  

Even funnier, though, was Moore’s delightful turn as a deluded amateur playwright, who insists on reading her five-act epic—itself a caricature of a Chekhov piece- to her woeful accidental mentor. Portrayed wonderfully by Howard Paley, the bewildered writer is too nice to oust her, but fears, sarcastically, that he’ll expire before she finishes her reenactment.

While the shorts are brilliant character studies, they don’t leave you with much to think about after you leave the theatre. Nor are they supposed to really, but Burton has brought the physician’s acute observations of human life to stage to entertaining ends. And to the director’s credit, the length of the play is just right: you’ll laugh, but just before your attention span runs out, it’s over.

 Bourree Lam