Ivanov
Rating 4/5
Belvoir St Theatre,
  September 23. Until   November 1.
It's been a patchy year on Belvoir's big stage but this pungently funny adaptation of Anton Chekhov's portrait of midlife despair tilts the balance hard toward the positive. 
Written in 1887, when Chekhov was in his late 20s, Ivanov - like his earlier Platonov (recently staged by the Sydney Theatre Company as The Present) - is regarded as a flawed piece, a stepping stone to The Seagull and Uncle Vanya.
Like Platonov, it too has been a magnet for adaptors, with Tom Stoppard and David Hare notable among them.
Belvoir's new artistic director Eamon Flack updates the setting of the story and, in amplifying the satiric aspects of the play, produces an effect more Gogolian than Chekhovian.
Some elements of the original are downplayed (Ivanov's wife Anna is vaguely "foreign" here, rather than Jewish) and minor characters are excised, resulting in an agreeably tight two and a half hours.
The plot is a spare one. Ivanov (Ewen Leslie) is 35, miserable, broke and out of love with his dying wife, Anna (Zahra Newman). Unable to bear her company (and his own), he escapes nightly to the nearby town and to the Lebedevs, to whom he owes money.
When his wife discovers a nascent affair with Sasha (rising star Airlie Dodds), the Lebedevs' 20-year-old daughter, Ivanov's stock plunges to a new low - though none, in the end, has a lower opinion of Ivanov than Ivanov himself.
Flack and designers Michael Hankin (set) and Mel Page (costume) shunt the story into the near present, with Flack imparting a dry Australian twist to the dialogue. The setting remains Russian, however, ranging from Ivanov's shabby farmstead to the taste-free zone that is chez Lebedev.
Hamlet references abound, and it's almost an in-joke to have high-profile former Hamlets in the title role. Kenneth Branagh, Ralph Fiennes and Ethan Hawke have all played Ivanov. Now Leslie, twice a Hamlet himself, can chalk his name on the honour roll. He's anything but the moody prince here, delivering a hugely entertaining performance with emotions writ large.
A fine supporting cast provides Leslie with the downdraft and disdain required, with Yalin Ozucelik excellent as the disgusted doctor Lvov and John Bell ideally cast as the irascible Shabelsky, a refugee from his own heyday.
Fayssal Bazzi is a clownish Borkin, Ivanov's lateral-thinking cousin. Blazey Best, her face contorted into a rictus of anxiety, is very funny as the wealthy widow Babakina. Helen Thomson demonstrates her perfect pitch for nouveau riche hauteur as Zinaida Lebedev, and John Howard brings touching warmth and sadness to the stage as her sozzled husband.
In short, this Ivanov is a beauty, and it's also reassuringly "Belvoir". Ralph Myers may have been the successor to Neil Armfield, but Flack seems more like the heir.