Is their a review of the Anton Chekhov play “Swansong”?
The Peter Hall Company’s seventh successive summer residency in Bath gets off to a relatively quiet start with a double bill of Chekhov and Rattigan. There is more excitement to come later in the season in the shape of Shaw, Storey and Frayn, but what is striking about the opening programme is how Rattigan, in his contained emotion and tragi-comic tone, seems far more Chekhovian than Chekhov himself. The truth is that Swansong is a flimsy one-acter, written in 1888, paying perverse homage to an elderly thespian in a manner that prefigures Harwood’s The Dresser or Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre. Chekhov’s hero is, in fact, a 68-year-old comic actor who finds himself locked in a theatre and who, attended only by a prompter, dwells on impending death, the life unlived and memories of past glories. The best bits are the quotations from Aeschylus and Shakespeare, but the piece has nothing much to tell us other than that theatre is a house of dreams. It simply gives its main performer a chanc
