The theatre arm of Liverpool, Capital of Culture, offers as its first contribution an extraordinary play by "Diane Samuels and Tracey-Ann Oberman after Anton Chekhov". I liked the play more than I expected, but I wonder what Anton Pavlovich would have made of it. The setting is a well-appointed house in Liverpool in 1946, and Anton Pavlovich would have been rather bemused by the ambiguity of the title. Hope Street was one of the most elegant streets in Liverpool; yet hope was not Anton Pavlovich's strongest suit. This play is about a Jewish family; the three sisters were born in New York, but grew up in Liverpool, and they long for Manhattan almost as Chekhov's characters did for Moscow.
Lindsay Posner's production unfolds at a leisurely pace, and Suzan Sylvester and Philip Voss lead a strong cast. But the play is taken both too far into and too far away from Chekhov country. The Vershinin character (Finbar Lynch) is a Jewish-American officer at a nearby US base; Mordy, the Solyony character, is ill-tempered and difficult because he had seen Auschwitz. When Tush (the Baron character) is killed, his fiancée is still determined to go to a kibbutz, as they had planned. Liverpool has a sizeable Jewish community, and a play with as much humanity and vigour as this one about their post-war life would have been better than a homage to Chekhov.
Everyman, Liverpool