I was lucky enough to live next door to a wonderful artist for the last ten years of her life before she died at 94. Tall, willowy and refined Dorothy could have been a member of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group. Vita Sackville-East we called her, because of our east London addresses and because she rather looked like Woolf’s lover.
She was a voracious reader of Russian literature, especially Chekhov’s short stories. However, when it came to directors imposing a modern vision on a classic text she was witheringly sceptical.
“Have they dickered with it?” she would ask when she knew I’d seen a Chekhov play. If we had been talking after I had seen this one which is “conceived and directed” by the German director Thomas Ostermeier and stars Cate Blanchett, my answer would have been “to within an inch of its life.”
But for a towering thicket of wheat at its centre, the Barbican’s hanger-sized stage is dominated by an oblivion of white that embraces (or traps) all who exist in it
