Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney
10 August, 2015

Life is but a series of choices. Some are made for love, others greed. Some are made for desire, while others are made in desperation. The choices we make, and the reasons we make them exist in a single moment, in the present, but once those actions are cast, like stones into the pool of our existence, the ripples they create travel out through our lives, as unstoppable, unchangeable consequences. This may be a fundamental truth that flows through the veins of all theatre, but in the words of playwright and Artistic Director of the Sydney Theatre Company Andrew Upton, “theatre is the music of reality, orchestrated and composed, scored in time and space.” In his masterfully adapted version of Chekhov’s first, flawed, unnamed and almost forgotten play, Upton has taken this obscure work and given it a familiar tune, to create an eloquent microcosm of the universal tensions that we all battle and struggle with. It is both a glorious ode to Chekhov and yet unmistakably Upton’s.

This may sound like a work of profundity on an intimidatingly earnest scale, but The Present tempers its deep undercurrent with a foreground of...