Photo by Marc Brenner

Echoes of Chekhov

Albion is a play whose setting, subject and scope echo the form of the plays of the great Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov. As we described in the podcast, the play is set in what amounts to a country estate, with an ensemble cast of family characters, as well as a range of servants and local neighbours.  As in Chekhov, not a lot happens within the actual action of the play; it consists of merely a series of conversations in the garden, but we learn that a lot happens to the characters off stage before and during the play:
– James has been killed in military service
– Anna has saved his sperm so that she is able to conceive a child after his death
– Katherine and Zara live together, then the relationship fails – it feels doomed much as Nina and Trigorin are in the Seagull
– Audrey has a retail business that specialises in white designer goods and “white customers”, and is struggling in her absence in the country
– Gabriel gives up on his plans for university

Mike Bartlett has talked about being inspired by the pace of Chekhov – that he was able to slow the action down, so that in the pace of everyday conversation the lives of the characters would unfold. He also referred to Chekhov’s ability to represent various points of view without favouring one, as he does so effectively himself in Albion.  He shows us multiple facets of his characters, their faults as well as their redeeming qualities. We come away from a Chekhov play and from this one not with a simple view of the world, but touched by the imperfect humanity of the characters and of the world.

Class and the City vs the Country
Audrey’s vision of her restored garden and its place in the world is one based on assumptions of class privilege. When she arrives as the new owner of the large house and property she behaves very much as the lady of the manor, dispensing economic largesse by employing locals to maintain her house and garden, but with an ill-concealed condescension toward her ‘servants’ and neighbours. She is put out, for example, when Zara invites the young neighbour Gabriel to join the family for tea in the garden – he is after all only the window cleaner. She is then surprised to discover that Gabriel knows the writer Katherine and her novels, no doubt assuming that such a country lad would not be so literate.

Audrey’s assumptions about class are clearly reflected in her views of an archaic social order that they imagine still pertains in the country. She is of course determined to protect the privacy of her property rather than open it up to allow the village fete to be held in her garden. Perhaps such a community event represents a threat to her privilege, as Gabriel describes the village festival as “where the normal social order is turned on its head”, to which Anna replies: “Last thing that she (Audrey) wants”. Her daughter Zara, having lived a privileged urban lifestyle, believes that country folk are “small-minded” and unlikely to be tolerant of alternative sexual orientation for example. 

The “beholders’ share”

We talked in our podcast about the different audience responses to the play between when it was first performed in 2017 during the height of the Brexit debate and in 2020 when the fervour of the debate had waned. Mike Bartlett referred to what the audience brings when they come to watch a show as the “beholders’ share’ of the communal artistic experience. At the time of the first production our share would have been hugely informed by our preoccupation with Brexit, such that the line from Audrey describing her garden as “our little piece of the world and we’re allowed to do with it exactly as we like” resonated with political meaning. However Mike has also said that he did not want the play to be about a single political issue, and by the time of the second production and since the play now feels richer, with the many other themes and characters’ personal concerns coming to the fore. In fact the play demonstrates how politics is at heart personal. That our world views come from our personal emotional lives.

The Queen Mother and her daughter
In strict observance of the purpose of a footnote, this is to set the record straight that as stated at end of our episode on Albion, Victoria Hamilton is in fact Claire Foy’s mother only in the fictional world of The Crown, where she plays the Queen Mother to Claire’s Queen Elizabeth. Just for the avoidance of doubt.