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The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

Lion and Unicorn Theatre

Reviewed – 5th August 2019

★★

“The cast work hard to portray a group of well-off people unprepared for tragedy and though this is occasionally comic, the point is not clear”

An audience of around twenty, respectable for a Monday night fringe show, were perhaps intrigued by the idea that a Tolstoy novella about the terrors of a life lived without meaning could work as light comedy. For Unmasked Theatre’s adaptation, bourgeois life around 19th Century St Petersburg is replaced with a technology-distracted Surrey milieu where we find self-satisfied, career ladder-climbing lawyer, Ivan Ilyich (Kevin Cherry), moving with his family into the splendid new home earned by his latest promotion. He then experiences a minor tumble from an actual ladder whilst hanging curtains. The resulting mysterious pain around his kidneys ineluctably becomes a terminal illness, giving him a grim, new perspective on friends and family. As mortality shifts the focal length of his moral lens, those closest to him appear superficial next to the authenticity of those he had previously considered least important, namely Gerasim (Tyrone Purling), his lower-class carer, and his youngest child, Vasya (George Todd).

The play follows the structure of the book, starting with the news of Ivan’s death and the reactions of his peer group. Then, after the respects are paid and sympathies relayed amid the banality of funeral arrangements, Ivan’s personal effects are boxed up for all eternity, at which point we head back to the start of the story. The strength of this chronology is that we know Ivan’s fate throughout and, at least in Tolstoy’s version, feel the ensuing horror of Ivan’s living death, as he slides, tormented, towards the inevitable.

However, Unmasked Theatre declare their version to be not about death, not even about Ivan, but about those who must witness dying. The cast work hard to portray a group of well-off people unprepared for tragedy and though this is occasionally comic, the point is not clear. Deprived of Ivan’s subjectivity, the characters’ behaviour seems normal. Dealing with death does indeed involve carrying on, trying to be cheerful, adapting to new realities and hoping for a cure, so it seems perverse to find it superficial or amusing.

The performances suit the topsy-turvy nature of the venture, with Kevin Cherry as Ivan starting weakly but getting better as he deteriorated and Sarah Widdas as his wife, Praskivya, creating just enough empathy to destroy the satire of her supposed insincerity. George Todd appears too old to be the tiny, overlooked Vasya with black rings around his eyes depicted in the novella, while Seerche Deveraux as Lisa is too slight a presence to resemble a brazen socialite. Even Tyrone Purling and Matt Turpin, who fare better with the two slippery doctors, are only successful because these characters are transplanted directly from the 19th Century when medics had to cover their cluelessness with bombast, so their emergence as comedy archetypes is fortuitous.

Like Ivan Ilyich, the enterprise is doomed from the start, but Pip O’Neill and Luke Oldfield co-direct to create a fluid production and provide a unique prism through which to experience Tolstoy’s late religious angst. Seen upside down, from another century, something of the original cautionary tale remains.

Reviewed by Dominic Gettins

Photography by Pip O’Neill

The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

Lion and Unicorn Theatre until 6th August as part of Camden Fringe 2019

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

How to Make me Happy | ★★★★★ | July 2018

Hummingbird | ★★★ | August 2018

In the Wake of | ★★★ | August 2018

The German Girls | ★★★ | August 2018

The Cut | ★★ | November 2018

BackPAGE | ★★½ | February 2019

Like You Hate Me | ★★★ | April 2019

Mama G’s Story Time Roadshow | ★★★★★ | May 2019

River In The Sky | ★★½ | May 2019

Euan | ★★★★ | July 2019

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Rialto Theatre Brighton

Reviewed – 8th May 2019

★

“as an audience, we remained uninvested and disconnected from Ivan’s fate, and therefore the story had no meaning”

Tolstoy wrote the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich in 1886, some years after his mid-life religious conversion. It tells the story of a high-court judge in 19th century Russia; his suffering from terminal illness and eventual death. This ‘updated version’ is faithful to the novella’s structure. We watch Ivan Ilyich’s painful decline in the midst of his family, who are too busy attending to their own selfish needs to see what is actually happening to him until it’s too late. We see his colleagues, intent on climbing the promotional ladder; his so-called best friend, with whom he no longer has any meaningful connection; and the pompous and self-congratulatory medical establishment, too immersed in their own concerns to properly address the needs of their patient. The only character capable of kindness and empathy, in this adaptation as well as in the novella, is Gerasim, the young man who cares for him. Ivan’s world (and by extension, our own) is exposed as one of petty materialism, and his relationships as empty and superficial. When he has his crisis of the soul, on the brink of death, we see that Gerasim’s kindness and empathy is the only truth, and the essential meaning of what it is to be alive.

Over a century on from Tolstoy’s profound literary meditation on the meaning of life and death, at a time when the world is hurtling toward climate catastrophe yet capitalist economies show no sign of paying attention, and materialist consumer culture is all-pervasive, an updated version of this simple story could be a searing and confrontational piece of theatre. Unfortunately, Unmasked Theatre’s banal, soulless and amateurish production was none of those things. It takes more than the addition of contemporary props (the ubiquitous mobile and laptop) and clunky references (the John Lewis Christmas ad) to update a story. And why, oh why, did Unmasked choose to stick with the Russian names? If we’re going to be in middle-class England, let’s actually be there. Kevin Cherry, as Ivan, made a reasonable fist of his central role, but the characterisation elsewhere was utterly superficial and the actors’ delivery skin-deep and unconnected. Multi-role work takes more than a change of clothing, and none of the characters were clearly realised or defined, which meant that, as an audience, we remained uninvested and disconnected from Ivan’s fate, and therefore the story had no meaning.

Putting on a fringe production is a labour of love, and there is rarely much money to go round, which means that fancy production design is not on the menu. Simplicity and invention therefore have to be the name of the game, and, sadly, this lesson did not seem to have been learned here. The tiny stage was far too busy, there were too many unnecessary costume changes, and the lighting and sound design was intrusive and heavy-handed (it was also unfortunate that there was clearly a rogue light which flashed on centre stage throughout). There was one well-realised and inventive staging sequence, involving the arrival of packages into the house, but it was the only one, and ultimately the only emotion this reviewer experienced at Ivan Ilyich’s death was relief.

Lion and Unicorn Theatre

Reviewed – 5th August 2019

★★

“The cast work hard to portray a group of well-off people unprepared for tragedy and though this is occasionally comic, the point is not clear”

Reviewed by Dominic Gettins

Photography by Pip O’Neill

The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

Lion and Unicorn Theatre until 6th August as part of Camden Fringe 2019

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:

Rialto Theatre Brighton

Reviewed – 8th May 2019

★

“as an audience, we remained uninvested and disconnected from Ivan’s fate, and therefore the story had no meaning”

Reviewed by Rebecca Crankshaw

Photography by Zo Morgan

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Rialto Theatre Brighton until 13th May as part of Brighton Fringe

Last ten shows covered by this reviewer: