Cate Blanchett as: Anna Petrovna

Directed by: John Crowley
Adapted by: Andrew Upton (Adapted from Anton Chekhov’s Platonov)
Play run: 4 August – 19 September 2015
Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre at Sydney Theatre Company
* The play had its Broadway transfer in 2016-2017.

 

 

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Anton Chekhov’s first play was a sprawling, unstructured epic but it marked out the style and themes he would return to in his later masterworks from The Seagull to The Cherry Orchard. It remains a mysterious, unpolished gem.

The manuscript, left unpublished until almost two decades after Chekhov’s death, lacked a title. Over the years it has inspired various adaptations – Wild Honey, Fatherlessness, The Disinherited –but it is most commonly referred to as Platonov, the name of the man at its centre. And yet, the play has always contained another extraordinarily rich and complex character – that of Anna Petrovna.

Taking on these roles are the fearsome talents of Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh. Irish director John Crowley, renowned for his work on the West End and Broadway, brings his lean and precise theatrical vision. And, as with his 2010 adaptation of Uncle Vanya, Andrew Upton lends his distinctive voice, brimming with vitality, to this tale of yearning, vodka and shattered dreams.

Cast:

Cate Blanchett as Anna Petrovna
Richard Roxburgh as Mikhail Platonov
Jacqueline McKenzie as Sophia
Susan Prior as Sasha
Chris Ryan as Sergei
Toby Schmitz as Nikolai
Anna Bamford as Maria
Andrew Buchanan as Osip
David Downer as Yegor
Eamon Farren as Kirrill
Martin Jacobs as Alexei
Brandon McClelland as Dimitri
Marshall Napier as Ivan

Creatives:

Costume design by Alice Babidge
Lighting design by Nick Schlieper
Sound design by Stefan Gregory

Related Images

View more images at the gallery.

Rehearsals; On tourRelated Videos

The last video is a playlist of interviews with the cast and creatives on their photocall and opening night, just click on the playlist icon/thumbnails to see the other videos in it.

Quotes from Cate Blanchett

• “What I like about the updating – Andrew’s updated it to 1995 I think we’ve settled on – is that when Chekhov was writing there was the sense of Russia in transition but it was quite a dangerous time politically and morally. Setting it in the mid 1990s, Russia is once again in that similar state of transition. With the wisdom of hindsight you see that there was a real chance for change. What is beautiful about it is that it really mirrors the state the characters are in. There’s still that opportunity to change. When you’re in your 40s, as we know, life’s not over.
  It has that depth of meaning when someone is approaching the middle of their life. Had the characters been in their 20s, there’s a self-centeredness to it whereas there’s a desperate futility and sadness about it. Suddenly the play has a purpose and an energy and an ache inside it.” (Jo Litson, July 2015)
• On her character, Anna Petrovna: “She’s very unresolved about her past and uncertain about her future. I probably share her uncertainty about the future, and I don’t think I’m alone there. I’m always looking for the points of difference, I think, between me and a character. So it’s not necessarily that I share personality traits with her, but I definitely connect with her preoccupation with time being so precious and so important; spending time with people, and how little we do it. That’s probably where I connect with her most.” (InStyle via CBF, February 2017)

Quotes from Others

• John Crowley:
  — On the play: “It’s about life, basically, and the choices that a group of people make. It’s also very, very, Chekhov, in a lot of ways truer to his spirit than a lot of period productions which rely heavily on a certain mood rather than actual drama.”
  — On the script: “It had the most wonderful, dynamic energy. The writing was alive from the inside out. Reading it, I got that warmth in the chest, the feeling one gets when you read an authentic piece of writing.”
  — On working with Cate Blanchett: “The way we rehearsed it is to try and create the feeling among the ensemble of being alive to every moment. Cate just flies with this. Some actors—especially actors who do film—have to focus on where they want to get the moment right. Cate wants to open that moment up and know what the parameters are. There will be times when something will go against the story, so you have a conversation and say, ‘If you do that, then that’s going to read as blah blah blah,’ and she’ll instantly rethink it or nix it. The emphasis and the degree of liveness are what she’s after—whether it’s rehearsing or performing on stage.
  Cate likes stress-testing moments in the play to see what they’re made of and how they’ll break. If she goes too far with it, she’ll pull back on it. She’s not somebody who likes to sit around, discussing things endlessly. She’s happier working on the floor, figuring out with another actor what the moment is about. Some actors really do have a more academic approach. Not Cate. She’s fantastically bright, but it’s allied to an instinct for playful acrobatics. You just need to give her enough rope to play with in scenes rather than too tight a space. She’ll rupture—with Richard Roxburgh, in particular, because he has very different energy as an actor. There’s more of a stillness there, and he in lots of ways is the anchor to her higher-acrobatic instincts.”
  — “I would say she is restlessly playful. I was surprised at how much of an instinctive clown there is in her. She’s completely nonintellectual in the play — and I say that because she is phenomenally bright. She’ll take any moment in a scene and try and prod it from dozens of different directions; oftentimes she’ll be extreme with something in order to try and open it up, or to open up a certain kind of moment with another actor. The quality of what goes on between her and another actor in the moment is everything to her, really. She is also unfailingly generous toward other actors on the stage and is very hard on herself. She is totally comfortable to be another member of the ensemble.”
  — On the ensemble: “What is very special here is that Cate is working with a company she has worked with so many times — especially with Richard Roxburgh. The quality that you get in moments of their scenes together has a degree of history to it — I don’t know that you can direct that. So when a company like this is led by Cate and Richard, who are both almost uncomfortable being center stage, there is no shortage of great character actors around them on that stage. In the first act, and certainly in the fourth, when you have pretty much everybody on stage, there is a vibrancy and energy that come from a number of conflicting points of view on the stage simultaneously, which is really thrilling. It reminds you of when you see Russian companies who have worked on a play for years and years and years together; that much time working together, that much time knowing each other, that much time doing different things, you cannot short-circuit that process.”
• Andrew Upton:
  — “Obviously I know Cate very well, and knowing that I could write it around her and Richard – they’re so beautiful together and have such chemistry onstage – allowed me to find the energy in the play and cut right to the heart of it.”
• Richard Roxburgh:
  — “It’s a play about a woman having a birthday and inviting all of her great friends around to share this experience, and of course it all goes terribly wrong. To do that with a company of players that you’ve worked with for so many years across so many permutations of experience is very special.”
• Jacqueline McKenzie:
  — “It is an incredible cast. Looking around the table and listening to the voices when we were doing our first read-through, it was just absolutely stunning. But if you had seen [Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh in] Uncle Vanya and their amazing chemistry and work together, as an actor you want to be a part of that. So that’s really how you can collect such an amazing group of people because we all want to be in amongst it. It’s Andrew’s [Upton] writing too. He’s an extraordinary adaptor.
  So you’ve got Chekhov, you’ve got Upton, you’ve got the Rox and you’ve got the Blanchett – and then you’ll get anyone.”

Selected Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews.

• The Guardian — “The Present fast forwards the 20th century from a pre-revolutionary Russia to a post-perestroika one, only to press pause at a classically Chekhovian country meeting between old friends, filled with the usual nostalgia, romance and regret. Less expected are the laughs – three full hours of them – which stop just shy of the play’s dramatic denouement and are more than a match for an Apatow.
  Womanising school teacher Mikhail Platonov (Richard Roxburgh), self-deluding doctor Nikolai (Toby Schmitz) and the simple, eager to please Sergei (Chris Ryan) are the kind of mismatched mates who could only have met in childhood. As adults, they are all equally ridiculous – albeit in very different ways.
  Foregrounding their farce, Upton drops some delicious Australianisms into the script as when marriage is compared to a never-ending renovation project. All the while, he builds the play’s dramatic tension around the titular Platonov and his one that got away, the (once) wealthy widow Anna Petrovna, whose 40th birthday is the occasion of this group get-together.
  With Roxburgh and Cate Blanchett earmarked for these roles from the off, who can blame him? Their chemistry is electrifying as ever. But The Present is a true ensemble piece, both in its expanded characters and the near perfect cast who bring them to life. Their constantly overlapping dialogue and emotional dance moves are masterfully choreographed by director John Crowley, particularly in the supper scene at the centre of this long day’s journey into the night.”
• Limelight via CBF — “Headlining a cast with Hollywood A-listers is inevitably a gift for drawing punters to a show, but Sydney audiences should also count themselves extremely blessed to have actors of the calibre of Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh willing to dedicate themselves to live theatre. Together Blanchett and Roxburgh’s rapport on stage, developed through years of working together at STC, is transfixing. Both navigate the rapidly changing narrative terrain, leaping from zinging comedy to gut-punching pathos, with astonishing athleticism, but this production is far more than just a two-hander. The Present thrives on the complexity of many intermingled lives and thus is a true ensemble effort. The 13 strong cast have worked hard, with director John Crowley, to weave in the nuances and imperfections of every day speech. People talk over each other, words are stuttered and tripped over: it creates a hugely absorbing sense of authenticity to the text that holds a mirror up to our own ways of communicating.”
• Australian Stage — “Cate Blanchett is luminous as Anna, twice thwarted in the love stakes, with a husband she loved dying and yearning for Mikhail unconsummated. Left with an estate she cannot manage she faces the prospect of a fiscally forced marriage to Yegor to continue the life she has grown accustomed to and Blanchett balances the strong, stoical sophisticate aspect of Anna with the reckless abandon of youth as youth abandons her.”
• New York Times — “As is so often the case, the party doesn’t really get going until everybody is good and drunk. Then, after much wine, vodka and awkward conversation, comes a fabulous eruption of runaway hedonism. Maybe, you think, coming to this shindig wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. You’ve known such moments, surely, when the spectacle of people going stark raving wild carries its own irresistible, anarchic logic. A feeling of vital connection saturates the room like the fizz from an exploded bottle of Champagne. Alas, the thrill is short-lived, a lonely cascade of fireworks in a night of damp squibs. And the briefly, beautifully animated revelers go back to being their soggy, miserable selves.
  That’s what happens — in terms of both plot and performance — toward the end of the first half of “The Present,” the Sydney Theater Company’s sprawling and confused adaptation of a sprawling and confused play written by a young Anton Chekhov. The mistress of these revels, I am happy to report, is the extraordinary screen star Cate Blanchett, making a long-awaited Broadway debut. Ms. Blanchett is portraying the hostess and birthday girl, Anna, a ravishing widow who is unhappily turning 40.
  Such commanding, try-anything charisma is useful if you’re attempting to hold together a badly assembled party or, for that matter, play. But here Ms. Blanchett’s take-charge inventiveness is as sorely taxed as that of her character. Anna’s party turns into the kind of disaster that ends not only in tears but also bloodshed.
  Ms. Blanchett does bring colorful shades of excitement to being bored. Her Anna plays a great game of dramatically uninterested chess, and her response to a rambling speech by Mikhail at the lunch table is priceless. (Hint: it involves the removal of an undergarment.) That comes just before that rip-roaring, scenery-destroying bacchanal I wrote about earlier. It’s one of the most memorable party sequences I’ve ever seen, a volcanic channeling of a displaced class’s fear, anger and disgust.”
• The Hollywood Reporter — “Despite the many explosive crescendos, gunshots, volatile meltdowns and farcical entanglements that punctuate The Present, it’s the melancholy aroma of regret — over bad choices, blind complacency and irreversible consequences — that perfumes the air in Andrew Upton’s vigorous reworking of Chekhov’s baggy first play, Platonov.
  The headline draw is the incandescent chemistry between Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh, both superb, playing characters whose dissatisfaction spreads like contagion among the guests. But this Sydney Theatre Company import is also a compelling ensemble portrait of people “trapped in loveless lives,” suspended between a past of illusory splendor and a compromised future in which the new order will leave many of them in the dust…
  A fiercely charismatic stage actor who offsets Mikhail’s bitterness with a louche air of mischief, Roxburgh is riveting in this long series of exchanges with the other characters, still toying with them even as he embraces his own sense of hopeless defeat. His performance is a scintillating match for Blanchett’s, with her willowy grace, her playfulness and bursts of febrile intensity, not to mention the supple modulations of that seductive voice. The two actors have worked together frequently over the years, dating back to a celebrated 1994 Hamlet, and watching them together is mesmeric, whether they’re skirting around unspoken sorrows or plastering a sardonic veneer over their unhappiness.”

Trivia & Facts

• The play had its Broadway transfer with previews starting 17 December 2016, and opening on 8 January through 19 March 2017.
• Cate Blanchett made her Broadway debut with this play.
• Cate Blanchett earned her first Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play.
• The play received four nominations from Sydney Theatre Awards: Best Mainstage Production, Cate Blanchett for Best Actress, Jacqueline McKenzie and Susan Prior for Best Supporting Actress.
• Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh earned nominations for Best Actress and Best Actor in a Play respectively at the 2016 Helpmann Awards.
• Cate was nominated for The Distinguished Performance Award at the Drama League Awards and Best Actress in a Play at Drama Desk Awards in 2017.
• Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh have worked together in film and theatre — Thank God He Met Lizzie (1997), Oscar and Lucinda (1997) and The Turning (Segment: Reunion, 2013); Hamlet (1994-95), The Seagull (1997), Uncle Vanya (2010-12), and The Present (2015-17).
• The original cast at the Sydney Theatre Company run all had their Broadway debut with this play.
• Cate Blanchett had come off from the set of Thor: Ragnarok (2017) to Ocean’s 8 (2018) where she had to wrap majority of her scenes to start rehearsals for the play.
• Anton Chekhov began writing the play when he was 18 and it was never performed in his lifetime.

Cast photocall, 8 December 2016; Unveiling of Sardi’s caricature, 14 March 2017