Platonov - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

In 1997, David Hare adapted the little-known play, Ivanov, and revealed the young Anton Chekhov as a markedly different writer from the one English-speaking audiences recognize from the more familiar plays.

Now Hare has turned his attention to another, equally surprising key work of Chekhov's youth - an abandoned seven-hour teenage manuscript in which a Russian schoolmaster faces up to the implications of being irresistibly attractive to four different women. Once again, we are introduced to a great Russian playwright who is funnier, more exuberant and more wildly romantic than anyone expects.

Platonov, in this adaptation, was premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in September 2001.

Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist and short-story writer, was born in 1860, the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf. After graduating in medicine from Moscow University in 1884, he began to make his name in the theatre with the one-act comedies The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding. His earliest full-length plays, Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Demon (1889), were not successful, and The Seagull, produced in 1896, was a failure until a triumphant revival by the Moscow
Art Theatre in 1898. This was followed by Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), shortly after the production of which Chekhov died. The first English translations of his plays were performed within five years of his death.