Yalta

The Yalta Game/ The Bear

"a delightful double bill"
Christopher Hoile, Stage Door

Written by Brian Friel, featuring Thom Marriott, Rebecca Northan and Brian Tree in the cast. A double bill of two short plays based on a story and a one-act vaudeville by Anton Chekhov. The production was directed and designed by Douglas Beattie with lighting by Jeff Johnston-Collins. Ann Stuart was the stage manager, assisted by Leslie Jost.

The Yalta Game/ The Bear ran for 9 performances, February 10 - 18, 2006.

The Stories
In The Yalta Game an innocent game at the famous Black Sea resort town turns into a passionate affair for a Moscow bank clerk and a young married woman from Pargolovo. In The Bear a man-hating widow and a woman-hating creditor square off over one of her deceased husband's debts.

From Touchmark's Press Release dated January 9, 2006:
The company... promises to be another exceptional cast combining extensive experience and great comic ability. Dora Award nominee Rebecca Northan who is making her Touchmark debut will play Anna, the young married woman from Pargolovo, in The Yalta Game and the man-hating widow Elena in The Bear. The womanizing Moscow bank clerk Dimitry Gurov in The Yalta Game and the super-annuated servant Luka in The Bear will be played by Stratford’s Brian Tree - Father Gustave in last season’s Blessings in Disguise. The bear or boor of the title of the second piece will be played by Stratford actor Thom Marriott who is also making his Touchmark debut.

Brian Friel and Anton Chekhov
Irish playwright Brian Friel was born in County Tyrone in 1929 and spent much of his youth in Derry, attending and later teaching school. His spiritual home however is rural Donegal, the home of his mother's family. It is there that he sets many of his original plays in the mythical town of Ballybeg. He became a full-time writer in the 1960s, having several radio plays, short stories and magazine articles to his credit. He says his early plays (like Philadelphia, Here I Come) are "all attempts at analyzing different kinds of love." After a period of disenchantment with the theatre in the 1970s, Friel co-founded The Field Day Theatre Company, for which he wrote his masterpiece Translations (1980). He is best known in North America for Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) which garnered three Tony Awards in New York (including Best Play) and was subsequently performed in dozens of regional theatres across the US and Canada. Friel has always experimented with form in his dramatic storytelling and found interesting ways for his characters to express their inner lives, particularly their sense of personal division and estrangement, and the influence on them of real or imagined memory.

In addition to writing original plays, Friel has adapted other writers. He has a particular affinity for the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904) to whom he is often compared. Prior to adapting The Yalta Game from a Chekhov short story entitled The Lady with the Little Dog and translating The Bear, he produced translations of Chekhov's Three Sisters (1981) and Uncle Vanya (1998).

The Yalta Game and The Bear were first produced at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on October 2, 2001, and March 5, 2002, respectively. Touchmark's were the Canadian premiere productions for both.

Director's Note
The theme of this double bill is infidelity. The two plays share a common author, a common adaptor/translator, and the same actors play in both. Beyond that, the contrasts between the two plays are striking, in style and form certainly, but also in terms of their maturity. Chekhov dashed off The Bear early in his writing career in 1888 "to while away the time"; it was so popular in his day that it became a mainstay of his income ever after, one of which he was privately a little ashamed. It is a youthfully brash satire in which we are invited to feel superior to the characters, particularly the protagonists, whose wrestling with their deep-seated anger towards and distrust of the opposite sex pushes them to ridiculous extremes. In The Yalta Game we are invited to respond compassionately to two flawed but likable human beings whose complexity more closely mirrors our own. The play is based on one of the last stories Chekhov wrote (in 1899) at a time when his health was failing and he knew his days were numbered. It is also the work of Brian Friel in his seventies. The Yalta Game is therefore the product of two mature artists whose experience of and sympathy for human frailty is unmistakable.

Reviews
"Touchmark Theatre explores aspects of love" (headline)... Sensitively directed by Touchmark Artistic Director Douglas Beattie, the two plays... are served exceedingly well by a shared cast... The double bill begins with The Yalta Game... a mature look back on the possibilities of love. Brian Tree... is especially fine as the experienced paramour. He's a gifted comic actor who can paint with a broad brush, as is evident in his portrayal of the ancient manservant Luka in The Bear. But he's also capable of a more methodical, nuanced pointilistic portrait as he demonstrates with Dmitry. Northan is equally effective as Anna and as Elena in The Bear... Thom Marriott, who after seven seasons creates more of a buzz with each subsequent season at Stratford, plays Gregory with great bluster...

Both comedies deal with sexual betrayal. However we must not be put off by the harsh sound of the term. We might well disapprove, but we are loath to condemn. The reason is that both plays explore the love that penetrates the heart and touches the soul by way of the imagination... love that affirms life in the face of convention and routine, the mundane and the commonplace. Touchmark's offering... reminds us that there is more to love than Friends, Sex and the City or Desperate Housewives.
Robert Reid, The Record & The Guelph Mercury
Touchmark Theatre closes its 2005-06 season with a delightfully intriguing double-bill of Russian subject matter filtered through an Irish sensibility... Both works are expertly directed, designed and performed, just as we’ve come to expect from this fine company.

The Yalta Game... finds fiftyish roué Dmitry Gurov whiling away his time at a seaside café in Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea, where Chekhov himself used to spend his summers. Within his purview comes a lady with a lapdog, Anna Sergeyevna, with whom he imagines and then succeeds in having a brief affair. Once separated both come to realize that through what they thought of as merely a casual fling they have in fact met the love of their life. Since they are both married to other people, what can they do?

To this simple plot from Chekhov’s story, Friel adds the "Yalta game" of the title. Late in the story Chekhov says of Dmitry "he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night". Friel begins the play with this idea. His Dmitry sits at the café playing the "Yalta game" by inventing secret or past lives for the various people who stroll by. Anna is part of these general speculations before he meets her. Since the play begins with Dmitry’s direct address to the audience, Friel encloses the action in a framework that makes it difficult to distinguish truth from fantasy. Friel also has Anna directly address us, but is her voice a realist counterpoint to Dmitry’s or is it included in his fantasy? Friel thus cleverly places us in the characters’ situation where imagination seems to triumph over reason.

Director and designer Douglas Beattie places the action on an empty, bi-level wooden stage where, except for a few tables and chairs, we have to imagine the various settings. We also have to conjure up from the actors’ gestures the lapdog, who, at one point, is said not actually to be there. Brian Tree is perfect as the fantasist cad, whose cynical view of the world is overturned by meeting Anna. It is a finely detailed portrait of someone whose deprecating view of others proceeds from his own negative view of himself. It’s a pleasure to see this Stratford veteran carry a play like this in a way that festival never seems to allow him. Rebecca Northan is a sensitive, complex Anna, suggesting even before she speaks an unhappiness lurking beneath her surface placidity. That it should burst out in passion and self-recrimination is no surprise.

The Bear is an excellent counterpart to The Yalta Game. Here, too, a man and a woman move from being strangers to falling in love, but where the situation is imbued with sadness in The Yalta Game, it is purely comic in The Bear. We meet the widow Elena, who has been mourning the death of her promiscuous husband for a year. Her aged servant Luka urges her to give up her secluded life but Elena insists that she will remain faithful to her husband even if he never did to her. Into her life barges a misogynist lieutenant Gregory, who demands that Elena pay him money her husband owed him or he will go bankrupt and will not leave until she does so. Rather like a Russian provincial version of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict, we detect from the vehemence of their professed dislike of each other the spark of attraction. In one of many ironies, the more we get to know Gregory the more he manifests all the worst traits of Elena’s late husband.

Thom Marriott, big and tall and with a booming voice is ideal as the bear-like soldier of the title. He makes very clear how Elena’s standing up to him turns from anger to admiration to infatuation. Rebecca Northan turns in a fine portrayal of Elena hinting through her irritation with Luka that despite what she claims, her self-imposed seclusion is becoming irksome. Brian Tree, in one of his more familiar roles as the comic servant, sends the audience into paroxysms of laughter every time Luka, plagued painfully with arthritic knees, has to negotiate a step. His look when Elena commands him “to throw out” the enormous Gregory is priceless.

In 2002 the Soulpepper Theatre Company of Toronto presented The Bear in an adaptation by Jason Sherman. Both Sherman’s adaptation and Albert Schultz’s direction treated the play simply as farce. In contrast, both Friel’s adaptation and Beattie’s direction seem more intent on seeing how this skit from 1888 looks forward to Chekhov’s four great full-length plays. Friel’s adaptation makes more a point of the characters’ language showing how Elena fairly rapidly descends from hauteur to the gutter language of Gregory. Beattie concentrates most of the physical comedy on the figure of Luka while exploring the psychological comedy of Elena and Gregory as they like Chekhov’s later characters juggle various states of conscious and unconscious self-deception. As a result, what in other hands seems simply a funny skit takes on a greater, more satisfying resonance.

Given the wall-less set backed by a blank screen, much of the credit for establishing mood and sense of place must go to lighting designer Jeff Johnston-Collins and sound designer Luke De Ruiter, especially in The Yalta Game with its frequent changes of location. Under Douglas Beattie Touchmark again achieves a level of production and performance equal to the best of our major classical theatre companies.
Christopher Hoile, Stage Door
This is the second (Touchmark) show that Carol and I have seen and we have been uniformly impressed on each occasion... There are so many shows that we've attended and come away with "it was good, but... " That hasn't been the case here. Today I came away feeling that I'd seen and experienced fine, well-crafted work.
David Antscherl, Waterloo