Wild Honey
Hampstead Theatre, London NW3
4/5

WHEN writer Michael Frayn received a script for translation from the National Theatre over 30 years ago, he must have thought all his Christmases had come at once.

The untitled play was by Anton Chekhov no less and, at more than six hours long, needed another writer’s handiwork to bring it to the stage.

The result was Frayn’s award winning Wild Honey, now playing at Hampstead Theatre as a fast and merciless comedy.

Central to the story is Platonov, a man with the singular problem that women pursue him endlessly with amorous designs.

We’re told that once, as a student, he was “like a second Byron’ but now, 27-ish, he’s a fading star.

A local schoolmaster in a compromise marriage, he sees himself as a joke and a failure. When he succumbs to women, it’s from weakness rather than passion — disaster for him and for those involved.

As these women, and consequently their men, are variously scorned and trifled with, the play turns into farce and the action hurtles towards a shocking and dramatic finale.

Geoffrey Streatfeild is a credible Platonov, while Justine Mitchell, Sophie Rundle, Rebecca Humphries and Jo Herbert keep the pace alive as superbly contrasting sexual predators who fuel the action. 

Rob Howell has come up with a wonderfully inventive set in which vertical planks of pale, mottled wood, punctuated by small struggling trees, break here and there into windows, doors and vacant spaces, filtering the light to give us airy summer evenings and high misty skies. When a train twice invades the stage like the sudden onset of mortality, the designer’s triumph is complete.

The staging is credited to the great director Howard Davies who shockingly died early on in the porcess and Jonathan Kent, called in to finish the job, must have found the experience very different from his recent production of Platonov, David Hare’s version.

Whereas Wild Honey is first and foremost an enjoyable and frantic comedy in true Frayn style, Platonov highlighted the impact of a wider world on the characters and enabled the poignancy of the human condition to complement the laughs — two different takes, both valid.

This is a play worthy of endless interpretation and Frayn has successfully exploited Chekhov’s comic genius in transcending the lives of his characters.

What emerges is a comment on us all as we see the inevitable and laughable disappointment in all our hopes and dreams.

Runs until January 21, box office: hampsteadtheatre.com