Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in repertory, 2008

Greg Powrie as Platanov and Richard Stemp as Dr Triletsky in Wild Honey

WHEN MICHAEL Frayn wrote Wild Honey in 1984, he did us all a favour. Instead of having to wade through Anton Chekhov’s lost early work, untitled but usually known as ‘Platonov’, which is twice as long as Hamlet and considerably less focused, we could enjoy a play that had many of the qualities of the Russian writer’s mature works as well as the farcical energy that Frayn had perfected in Noises Off. He stripped the play to a fraction of its running time, channelled its themes and enjoyed a hit at London’s National Theatre in a production starring Ian McKellen.

Many of those qualities are present in John Durnin’s opening production of the Pitlochry summer repertoire season – the first of six plays ranging from the comedy of Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus to the drama of David Greig’s Outlying Islands – but despite the efforts of a large and lively ensemble, the show falls between two stools.

Where the opening scene of languid Chekhovian time-wasting is played too briskly to capture the stultifying boredom of Russian provincial life, the later scenes of farcical misunderstandings lack the manic psychological drive to make them funny. The two things are related: we need to appreciate the characters’ frustration if we’re to laugh at their doomed attempts to escape it.

There are two key jokes that propel the action. One is the idea that a man, Platonov, played by Greg Powrie, is being pursued by no fewer than three women while his young wife looks on oblivious. This accounts for the farce. The other is that Platonov is a fraud and it is only because of the women’s desperately dull lives that he seems appealing. This is the ironic comedy for which Chekhov became famed.

Powrie plays Platonov, a school teacher relaxing in his in-laws’ country house for the summer, with good-hearted enthusiasm, but too little sense of the charisma – fake or otherwise – that makes him stand out from the crowd. The production doesn’t make it clear what his would-be lovers are trying to escape from and he gives few clues about the “intelligence, looks [and] spirit” that draws them to him.

A comedy with such echoes of Don Juan needs a sexual charge that simply isn’t present here. The uncertainty takes the edge off the comic escapades that follow, creating a show that has more energy than mirth.

© Mark Fisher, 2008

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