Stage: On the other hand…
Local actor and writer Robert Cohen’s Something Rotten
While the jury is out over Benedict Cumberbatch’s Barbican Hamlet, the City of Brighton & Hove is to hear the thoughts of another player from Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy: Claudius of Denmark.
Something Rotten, written and performed by Brighton’s own Robert Cohen, looks at the events of the world’s most famous play from the viewpoint of Hamlet’s uncle-turned-stepfather – King Claudius, the fratricidal regicide who marries his victim’s widow and in turn excites both the homicidal and the procrastinatory impulses of the prince.
“Claudius is an endlessly intriguing character,” says Cohen; “We know he murdered Hamlet’s father and married his mother, but Shakespeare doesn’t give us too much else. How long has Claudius had designs on his brother’s crown? How long have he and Gertrude been at it? How did he get on with his nephew, prior to the recent upheavals? And, just by the by, how did Yorick become the most famous corpse in literary history?”
Directed by Jenny Rowe, Something Rotten was premiered at the Barnstaple Fringe TheatreFest, where the system of audience reviews brought forth such comments as “A very committed performance from an outstanding performer. A great show for those familiar or, like me, unfamiliar with Hamlet.”
Robert Cohen has specialised in characters ‘beyond the pale’, from Don John in Much Ado About Nothing to the real-life McCarthyite supergrass in The Trials of Harvey Matusow (FringeReview Outstanding Theatre Award) to the Russian gangster Stepan in the BBC sitcom Ideal to the tormented traffic warden Quint in High Vis – the latter winning acclaim.
Something Rotten, The Dukebox Theatre, The Iron Duke, Waterloo Street, Hove, BN3
Saturday 3rd October, 8pm
Tickets £5 via www.dukeboxtheatre.com
www.bobbycohen.co.uk
The Young Chekov
Anton Chekhov is one of the undisputed masters of world drama. He is usually thought to hide himself behind his characters and stories, keeping his own personality well off-stage. But when he was young he wrote three plays, Platonov, Ivanov and The Seagull, which, with their thrilling sunbursts of youthful anger and romanticism, reveal a very different playwright from the one known by his mature, more familiar work.
Now the Young Chekhov season at Chichester Festival Theatre brings these three blazing dramas together to offer audiences the chance for the first time ever to explore the birth of a revolutionary dramatic voice.
THE SEAGULL
On a summer’s day in a makeshift theatre by a lake, a bold new play is to be performed. It is the work of a young, would-be playwright, Konstantin, who is searching for a new, more authentic dramatic form.
The play stars his beautiful muse and neighbour, Nina. The assembled family audience includes his actress mother, Arkadina, who has just arrived from Moscow with the famous novelist, Trigorin.
What happens during, and in the days immediately after, this play’s first performance will change not just the course of the summer, but the lives of everyone involved, for ever after. This masterly meditation on love and art is both comic and tragic, and marks the birth of the modern stage.
IVANOV
Nikolai Ivanov, a regional councillor and landowner, has tried to live his life in a bold new way, taking risks in everything from business to romance. Now his estate is failing, his wife is dangerously ill and he’s up to his neck in debt. To cap it all, he’s surrounded by malicious gossip.
Against his better judgment he sees an irresistible opportunity, in the adoring form of Sasha Lebedev, daughter of the Chairman of the local council. She offers her devotion, youth and beauty, but also the considerable riches of her name. But can Ivanov survive the guilt and shame scandal would bring?
Set in a remote backwater, this angry and outspoken play, streaked with satire, drink and anti-Semitism, is full of an outright passion Chekhov would soon forego in his later plays.
PLATONOV
Russian schoolteacher Mikhail Platonov, has a problem, one he has lived with all his life – he’s irresistible to women. Alongside the attentions of his home-loving wife, Sasha, he must also attend to the racing pulses of Maria Grekova, a young chemistry student, Sofya Yegorovna, a married acquaintance from his past, and most dangerously of all, one of Chekhov’s greatest creations, Anna Petrovna, a formidably intelligent widow.
If that wasn’t enough, he’s broke, in debt, and about to lose his home. For the sanity of everyone, and the stability of society, something must be done about Platonov.
Set in the blazing heat of the middle of nowhere, complete with criminals who live in the forest and a runaway train, this freewheeling comedy is a cry of defiance at the adult traps of conventionality and moral hypocrisy.
Young Chekhov promises to be an extraordinary event. Performed by one ensemble of actors, each play can be seen as a single performance or they can be enjoyed as one event, either over different days or as one intense theatrical experience on trilogy days on Saturdays 10, 17, 31 October and 14 November.
