The Irish novelist George Moore claimed that “Ireland is a little Russia”. Given that the distance from Moscow to St Petersburg alone would take you from one side of Ireland to the other and back again, it was an audacious cultural land-grab. But you can see what he meant — always longing for something other and elsewhere, and telling stories about that other makes it seem more real.
It is certainly a connection that Brian Friel has made throughout his career. And as a writer of plays as well as short stories, to describe him as an Irish Chekhov does no disservice to either. The Yalta Game itself is a dramatisation of an original Chekhov story called Lady with Lapdog. (Afterplay, another Friel take on a Chekhov original, joins The Yalta Game and Faith Healer in repertory later in the week to complete the Edinburgh International Festival’s Friel celebration from the Gate Theatre in Dublin).
The game is the one played by holidaymakers in the Crimean seaside resort of the title (this is long before Churchill and Stalin and all that), observing each other on the terraces and in the coffee shops in the town square, speculating, gossiping.
When a practised rou?, Dmitry Gurov, on holiday from his family in Moscow, spots a dewy new arrival, the newly wed Anna Sergeyevna, the lady with the Pomeranian, on holiday from a country town near St Petersburg, she is easy prey to his worldly charms. An affair begins. She falls in love.
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And he too, long after the holiday romance should have faded, finds that he is entranced by her guileless surrender, so much so that he pursues her to her home town and a long-distance affair develops.
It sounds almost banal, and yet in every nuance, every cadence, you sense that refrain of longing for something more that is just out of reach. Chekhov and Friel leave the lovers, so far undetected, caught in no man’s land, unable either to advance or to retreat.
Where an American might make a wise-cracking but trivial comedy (such as Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year) of such a situation, the Russians and the Irish make light of it only because they sense the impending tragedy.
And what makes Patrick Mason’s production, so apparently plain with just a dozen white chairs scattered about, so perfectly suited to its subject is its own lightness of touch. Even the lighting is bright and white until the lovers are trapped in a final silhouette.
The performances of Riste?rd Cooper, in his rumpled white linen suit, and Rebecca O’Mara, fresh as ripe peach, dance trippingly above the abyss. You long for a second act, really, but it’s hard to imagine this one better done.
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