At first Kenneth Branagh appears so indifferent, even detached, as not to inhabit his character's dead-end life at all. Ivanov, the anti-hero of this early and underrated Checkhov play, is insolvent despite the lands and talents with which he was endowed; obsessed, in an undirected way, with his well-being; no longer in love with his saintly wife who has abandoned her Jewish faith for him and happens to be dying of TB; and while the doctor attends to her in the evenings he escapes to the house of one of his creditors, with whose very much younger daughter he is carrying on an affair.
       He claims to loathe himself for his moral weakness and to be wracked by confusion - and the play alludes more than once to Hamlet as if the two were kindred spirits. But in the first and second acts Branagh's Ivanov seems anything but morally tormented or in mourning for his life's real potential. His melancholy is driven by more pragmatic considerations: his financial losses, his failure to make a splash in the world, and the stress of fending off those creditors.
       While he is fussing about all this and self-consciously comparing himself to the Dane and the famous “superfluous man” of nineteenth century Russian literature, who is unable, as we say nowadays, to ‘get a life', Gina McKee gives us an extraordinarily moving Anna Petrovna, his appallingly treated wife. We know that she is dying, though she doesn't until her husband inadvertently breaks the news to her. She has lost her parents, her religion, her money, and her husband's love; and her life is ebbing away. McKee articulates this suffering and its confusion with chilling and eloquent intensity. Until, seeing her husband in a tryst with Sasha one evening, she faints magnificently. Fainting in the theatre is usually a cringe-making business and one is glad when it is over; but this was right up there for poignancy and finality.
       Sasha looks on in her willfully unseeing and naive way, so well conveyed by Andrea Risborough. Her life is dominated by Ivanov, with whom she is convinced she has been in love since childhood. Risborough does clichéd infatuation superbly - along with all the cooing and flirting and impatient waiting that accompany it. She has the stage presence to remain the life of the party at her parents' home for nearly a whole act.
       Michael Grandage, the artistic director of the Donmar, has palpably given his actors the scope and discipline to bring the best out of themselves - and he is aided by splendid designs from Christopher Oram and lighting by Paule Constable that genuinely illuminates the characters and their shifting moods. Grandage has also given a play that easily invites slapstick and melodrama just the right measure of boisterousness and doom. His casting is spot on. In addition to the major roles, Malcolm Sinclair as Ivanov's uncle wonderfully evokes the widower aristocrat in search of a new wife with plenty of money. Tom Hiddleston's doctor is excellent as the prig who thinks he has got the measure of every action and its moral worth. Though his vituperative attacks on Ivanov are obviously justified, our complete failure to sympathise with him is tribute to Hiddleston's capacity to convey the unpleasant and always simplistic nature of self-righteousness.
        Through all this and much more Branagh's Ivanov seems stirred but not moved. It is all rather baffling - until we realize, in the third act, that this is precisely the brilliance of Branagh's performance: to show us what a horrendously fortified and self-regarding state cold indifference is. Even self-pity isn't given much a chance to break into this rigid universe. Only shame has occasional access: one of the most memorable moments is Ivanov's brief breakdown when Sasha's kind but weak father Lebedev, superbly played by Kevin McNally, offers him money to pay the interest owing to his own - Lebedev's - wife. This is when Ivanov has his Hamlet moment: he stares with desperate intensity at the wad on the table before crumpling into a foetal coil by Lebedev's feet, sobbing now for his life. It is a great and tragic moment of theatre. But his armour is soon fully-functional again, and he continues to snake his charming way around women, friends, employees, creditors - and their collective mistrust of him. Until one day - his wife is now dead and he is expected in church to marry the young Sasha - he cracks suddenly and catastrophically. He can't go ahead with the wedding. Suicide is the immediate response. And one asks: but why?
       Ivanov shows how inscrutable even reasonably clear moral situations are. What are Ivanov's real intentions? Does he love either of the women? When he says he does - and when he says he doesn't - what does he mean? Does he care about his career? Does self-regard or the regard of others really drive him - or do more elusive wishes, hopes and fears? Why are the women attracted to him? As a case to rescue? For the charm of the mercurial? Branagh's genius is to act this impenetrability, to show its unyielding nature and yet to rivet us where a lesser actor would merely bore. In doing so he reveals the fascination of the play - and perhaps why it has been so unjustifiably neglected.
Simon May