Anton Chekhov’s insistence that he wrote “comedies, almost farces” is often ignored by British productions, which have the tendency to impose a stultifying Russian glumness.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Charing Cross Theatre, London

Anton Chekhov’s insistence that he wrote “comedies, almost farces” is often ignored by British productions, which have the tendency to impose a stultifying Russian glumness. So the playwright might approve in spirit of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a 2012 scholarly romp by Christopher Durang featuring three modern American siblings named by literature professor parents after Chekhov characters.

Vanya and Sonia, both unmarried in their fifties, share the family Pennsylvania farmhouse, bills met by absent Masha, who has the name of one of the Three Sisters but the profession of the touring actress, Madame Arkadina, from The Seagull. A name from that play, Nina, goes to a local teenager, who becomes attracted to a non-canonical character, Spike, a pretty but dim young actor with whom the much-married Masha hooked up on tour.
What we might call a Masha-up of Chekhovian themes enjoyably includes a blue heron, rather than seagull, as pivotal bird; the estate boasts a few cherry trees but brother and sisters dispute whether these form an orchard; Vanya (like Konstantin in The Seagull) has ambitions to radicalise theatre with a new play, but has a sexual choice not possible in Chekhov.

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