UOW’s theatre season is pumping this year, with some exciting performances that will be blowing the roof off of the Julian Broadbent building. This week we have Dan Rebellato’s Chekhov in Hell, directed by Peta Downes, appearing from the 26th to the 28th of October 2023.
The coming weeks will see The Iphigenia Project, Life 2 Music, The Antipodes, and The Flu Season all being performed on campus featuring UOW Performance and Theatre Students. Keep yourself posted on our socials for reviews of those shows!
I caught Thursday night’s performance of Chekhov in Hell.
What if your favourite 19th century playwright didn’t die of tuberculosis but instead woke up in modern day London after a century in a coma? What would he think of the world around him? Of selfies, twitter, fast fashion, LED plasma screens, and celebrities?
This is the world poor old Anton must confront in an electric series of vignettes in Chekhov in Hell. In his escapades, Chekov confronts the bullshit, duplicity, and pandering rife in our day, and is left asking ‘What happened here?’
Sebastian Lodge is compelling as a disoriented Chekov, and actually looks (to me) strikingly like the playwright (I think it’s the eyes). Charlotte Lee appears as both Chekov’s wife, Olga, and his last remaining relation in modern London, tired mum Nicola Chalker. As both, she is an energising presence on the stage and brings a good deal of laughter. As Nicola, Lee synchronises on the stage with Lodge as Chekhov as two human characters, beset on all sides by swindlers and bullshit artists.
Samuel Noll nailed a misogynistic fashion designer, a somewhat overzealous cop and four other roles. Connor Andis, Adam Watt, Cooper Dawson, Amy Crean, Chelsea George, and Amelia Harding all slip seamlessly between multiple roles.
The play cuts through to the core of our insecurities and yearnings in our banal modern hellscape. Scenes begin with the typical mundanity we are used to, a banality that masks an insidiousness behind corporate speak and familiar wokeisms. That is until characters snap, suddenly fed up with the compromise and bullshit they are forced to perpetuate, and these moments are when the cast get a chance to shine. Towards the beginning of the play, a patronising London doctor, played by Cooper Dawson, suddenly snaps, sick of covering his own arse and admitting ‘We fucked up’. For this he is reprimanded by the nurse, who can’t allow a lawsuit.
But our humanity is buried so deep that when we do snap, and abberate from the bullshit, we are unable to find the fulfilment we need. One such scene came in a brilliant monologue from Amelia Harding as she pitches a TV show to a confused Chekhov. She deviates from the show’s pitch, and the lights focus on her as she talks of the desire to make another person happy. That desire to make another person happy is why, she says, she finds herself performing oral sex in a stranger’s flat. Sex, it seems, is the only medium to communicate true desire, which leaves us frustrated and unsatisfied. This play holds a mirror to our empty lives, and gives a profound call for humanity, a message which this cast cut through well.
Brushing a few dodgy accents to the side, those familiar or not with Chekov’s work will find in Chekhov in Hell a few laughs and a chance to reflect on the madness that is our modern hell.
You can find more info on show times and purchase tickets here.