Watching any of Anton Chekhov's great plays with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard not to be haunted by the knowledge of what will happen to the characters over the next 20 years. We know, as they do not, that the world they inhabit is about to implode, that they will almost certainly be wiped out by the Russian Revolution. More, perhaps, than any other fictional characters, they have an afterlife that is entwined with the real world of history.
This may well be one of the reasons why Chekhov is a source of such infinite fascination for Brian Friel, who now follows his translations of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya and last autumn's dramatisation of The Lady with the Lapdog with a version of The Bear and a short play inspired by two Chekhov characters.
Friel has long been interested in the afterlife of both real and invented people. Living Quarters, for example, is at one level a contemplation of what happens after the end of Euripides's Hippolytus. Making History deals with the interplay of reality and retrospection in the figure of Hugh O'Neill. The main character in Faith Healer is already dead.
It is not, therefore, entirely surprising that in by far the most substantial of the two new pieces at the Gate, Afterplay, Friel is concerned with what happens to the ineffectual brother, Andrey, after Three Sisters and to the stoical, lovelorn Sonya after Uncle Vanya.
What is initially surprising, though, is that when Andrey and Sonya meet up in a down-at-heel Moscow café in the early 1920s, the history we know about hasn't happened. There is no sense at all of the cataclysm of revolution and war. Andrey can take the train regularly from Taganrog to Moscow, allegedly to play as a violinist at the opera. Sonya can still negotiate with the Ministry for Agriculture to try to save what's left of her dwindling estate. Her unrequited love, Astrov, is still running his schemes to improve the lives of the peasants. If things are falling apart, it is just the working-out of the slow domestic decline that was under way in the plays themselves.
At first, this seems like a cop-out, as if we were being asked to believe in two Jewish characters carrying on their sad little lives in Berlin in 1940. Until you remember that we are not being asked to believe anything at all.
These characters are doubly fictional - Friel's re-invention of Chekhov's inventions, the afterlife of people who never actually lived. The territory, in other words, is Friel's most deeply cultivated ground - the borderland between story and history, truth and illusion, memory and invention. The very absence of the historical reality we expect is the device that locates us in this strangely alluring never-never land.
All of this makes Afterplay a vastly more intricate and substantial play than the schematic exercise a quick summary of the basic idea might suggest. It is a Friel play, not a doodle in the margins of Chekhov. And an intensely moving Friel play at that, performed with breathtaking skill by John Hurt and Penelope Wilton. Hurt's gravelly charisma is perfect for the dignified melancholy of a man whose one success in life is the unadulterated purity of his failure. Wilton is simply astonishing.
It takes an extraordinary emotional grace to be at once ghostly and real, to hover so beautifully between utter conviction and haunting absence.
THE only serious criticism of the evening is that Afterplay would have been better served if it had been paired with The Yalta Game, which the Gate presented last autumn, than with Friel's version of The Bear. His interest in this short one-act farce is clearly that it, too, deals with a kind of afterlife. The young widow, Elena (Flora Montgomery), in mourning for a year, declares herself effectively dead, only to be stirred back into life by the irruption of the wild, blustering, salty-tongued Gregory (Stephen Brennan).
As he has done with vastly bigger Chekhov plays, Friel injects an irresistible vitality of language, illuminating the characters with a wonderful range of styles, from haughty politesse to gamy vernacular. The Bear, however, remains what Chekhov always thought it was: a bagatelle. And in spite of the best efforts of Brennan and Eamon Morrissey (as the decrepit servant, Luka), there is an element of reverence in Robin Lefevre's production that stops it from being the bit of gas that it is meant to be.
Sometimes, it is well to remember, long-forgotten trial pieces by young geniuses were forgotten for good reasons. And sometimes, as Afterplay reminds us, the seemingly small offerings of mature masters can be infinitely memorable.
