cover2cover Dan Cotterall

It’s Sunday afternoon! Miss Brill extracts her fur from its box and heads gaily to the park where the people from this southern French town like to stroll, chat, observe each other and listen to the band as it strikes up a tune in the green rotunda. Miss Brill's particular pleasure is to sit on her favourite park bench and listen in on the conversations of others. She feels that she is one of the actors in these eagerly anticipated Sunday performances! This story by Katherine Mansfield is a f...

Measure for Measure was Shakespeare’s first Jacobean play. After acceding to the English throne in 1603, King James became the sponsor of Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe… and Shakespeare thumbed through the new monarch’s publications to see who he was dealing with. The Duke Vincentio of the play resembles King James 1. And yet Shakespeare succeeds in making this fantasticall Duke of dark corners both a problem solver and an eerily disturbing character.

The Cheek by Jowl production of Measure for Measure from 2016 - in Russian - dispenses with some of the comic characters to intensify its focus on the Duke. The setting for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play, from 2019, is 19th-century Vienna - lush and oppressive. It is fascinating to see how two top directing and design teams shake, shape and stir this great play – in which Isabella pronounces one of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches.

In this episode, we reflect on how these three stories - The Man in a Case, Gooseberries and About Love - intermesh. Chekhov draws his characters with gentle, clear-eyed irony. Like the curious figure of Mavra, these men fear to take decisive action, they clothe their deepest aspirations in silence and shy away from risk. There are brief moments of radiance but the rain that falls during these stories leaves hopes and dreams damp and defeated.

“The Man in a Case” is the first of three stories that Chekhov wrote around the year 1898 about the lives and characters of the schoolmaster Burkin, the veterinarian Ivan Ivanovitch and the landowner Alehin. This first story introduces the ludicrously cautious character Byelikov, a professor of Greek who is afraid of anything that involves risk and novelty. Burkin describes how, despite this temperament, Byelikov comes very near getting married…

Ivan Ivanovitch tells the second story – “Gooseberries” – about his brother Nikolai’s 25-year attempt to establish himself on a farm in the countryside where he can drink tea, watch his ducks swim and grow gooseberries. Dismissive of his brother’s rural ambition, Ivan Ivanovitch becomes passionate – in the warmth of the drawing room – about the importance of not allowing oneself to be lulled to sleep.