Word: ivanovic
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...relations with the West. The U.S. Navy announced Friday that its forces maintaining a blockade of Iraq were holding a Russian tanker pending tests to establish the origin of the oil on board, prompting a furious reaction from Moscow. The incident came the same day as Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov castigated a decision by European Union member states to suspend Russia from the Council of Europe for its refusal to accept independent investigation of human rights violations in Chechnya...
...hand-wringing looks unlikely to stop Russia's Chechnya campaign - particularly since it's not backed up by any credible threat. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned Friday that the U.S. was "reviewing" loans to Russia as she joined G7 foreign ministers and her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, in Berlin for talks on the crisis. But President Clinton last week emphasized Washington's belief that sanctions are an inappropriate response to the Chechnya situation, and Moscow isn't likely to lose any sleep over the latest warnings. Having reportedly lost an armored column in a botched assault...
...therein lies the problem of the A.R.T'.s Ivanov. Yeremin may want his actors to fade like tiny points of light into the world around them, but Chekov's text is meant to act as a magnifying glass, to make the world of social conventions and thinly veiled subtexts appear larger than life. Chekov is the great playwright of the strained relationships humans have with themselves and with one another; looking in Chekov for the larger metaphysical themes of man in landscape that Yeremin's visuals try to evoke is a lost cause. Yes, Ivanov is about loneliness and isolation...
...This battle comes across most clearly in the way Yeremin directs his actors. Ivanov tells the story of Nikolai Ivanov, a once idealistic young landowner now made tired and obsolete by the failures of the liberal reforms of Czar Alexander III. Ivanov is sick of his life, sick of his wife now dying of tuberculosis, sick of his entire milieu. He is bored with his very existence. The insight and sensitivity that Chekov shows for his characters and their problems comes across in whispers and unsaid words, in the meanings that we hide underneath meaningless social conventions. For Yeremin, though...
...production simply cannot hold. Yeremin turns the speeches Chekov meant his characters to address to one another into performance pieces directed at the audience, turns moments of quiet, embarrassed emotional confessions into visual spectacles. Gone is the intimacy that makes Chekov brilliant and the nuance that makes him profound. Ivanov the play is too beautiful a play to be treated so harshly. And Ivanov the production is too gorgeous to engage in such a struggle. Chekov and Yeremin are both brilliant, but their brilliance is not of the sort that can be reconciled...