The first large scale play written by Anton Chekov, Platonov revolves around the burnt-out inhabitants of a Russian manor, who seem trapped there, as if in a cosmic time capsule. Sentenced to one another, they torment each other and experience the lurches of the heart the young Chekov invented for them. Yet director Konstantin Bogomolov changes the rules of this game: we have women in the men’s roles and men in place of the women, creating a subversive feminist subtext about the arbitrary violence of the patriarchy, and the authority of the male gaze. Otherwise, the Russian director serves up this Chekov fairly straight. In this omnipresent tedium of life on the peripheries of an empire, the local Don Juan, the Platonov of the title, is king; he is played in a restrained yet masterful way by Anna Radwan. Performed in Polish with <strong>English subtitles</strong>.