Chekhov and Oates

Summary of Colgan's Article

The production of foreign dialect performances in report versions - competently transformations of transformations - can be a perilous undertaking, in hazard of mislaying feel with the original. Frank McGuinness has an estimable pathway record in this area, and, his Uncle Vanya, after Chekhov, in the new output by Field Day at Derry's Guildhall, was awaited with some interest.

The time and location stay the identical, Russia at the turn of the century; and the individual characteristics are provided with dialogue which permits only some secondary colloquialisms as a help to accessibility. A focal issue of this output was compelled to be the presentation of Stephen Rea in the name function, and he has a couple of shocks for us. That said one tends to be constantly attentive of the player at the total cost of the character.

Other functions are very well taken. Enda Oates is fine as Astrov, idealistic medical practitioner turned cynic. Denys Hawthorne's Professor, married man to Vanya's late sister and now dwelling with a new juvenile wife, makes a superior cuckoo in Vanya's nest. Kim Thomson is uninterested and dignified as his wife, and the key function of Sonya, niece to Vanya and hopelessly in love with Astrov, is touchingly performed by Zara Turner. Pauline Delaney, P G Stephens and Helena Carroll take lesser components with carefully discerned touches.

Peter Gill marshals and modulates his actors well but the heart of the issue beats only fit completely here. Costumes and lighting, by Pamela Howard and Andy Phillips, are excellent. (Charbonneau, J3)

Summary of Charbonneau's Article

The computer display goddess's good status and persona have triggered the fantasy of the lowest tabloid- kind hacks, as well as so-called grave writers like Norman Mailer (who called her an "angel of sex") and now Joyce Carol Oates.

Throughout her fantastically prolific vocation (more than 100 publications of fiction, non-fiction, verse and drama since 1963), Oates has discovered the darkest edges of human environment and made tales with tragic conclusions starring impaired persons with rotated outlooks of the world. With her penchant for Gothic tales and grotesque individual characteristics, she might have in writing about burst satanic shock-rocker Marilyn Manson rather than of the well renowned fair-haired bombshell. But arrive to believe of it, Monroe is the quintessential Oates character.

In gossip-obsessed Hollywood, Marilyn's status at the size of her vocation was that of a neurotic, suicidal, drug-addicted nymphomaniac. The truth, as asserted by Oates, wasn't so far off. Marilyn was a manic-depressive whose ego and self-esteem were as fragile as crystal. She was a woman of contrasts: at one time sugary and bitchy, powerful and feeble, bright and clueless. Certainly not your usual "dumb blonde," she read Pascal, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Schopenhauer. She was compulsive and impulsive; fast to love, just as fast to leave behind, even to hate.

To battle her feeling swings and chronic insomnia, she turned to the studio medical practitioners, Samaritans from Hell peddling pharmaceuticals with less scruples than your district crack- cocaine dealer.

In the "Author's Note," ...