The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 45

19. THE INDEPENDENT TABLOID FRIDAY 210297 Rue with a difference THEATRE Ivanov The Almeida, London Harriet Witter, infinitely moving as Ivanov's dying wife, wffh Ralph Ren ties Geraint Lewis provincial society that Kent's fine production farcically exhibits in all its grasping materialist grotesquerie. At a soiree where a terminally plodding piano tune epitomises the insufferable boredom, we witness Ostrovsky-like vulgarians guffawing at witless anti-Semitic jokes, plotting mercenary marriages, and having to go on the hunt for food because of the miserliness of the rich hostess. Whether Ivanov himself is above marrying for money is the question reopened in the course of the play, while his willingness to resort to loutish racism is shockingly demonstrated in a row with his wife (an infinitely moving Harriet Walter). It is Fiennes's achievement to give you an unsparing look at the unloveliness of the hero's behaviour (the sudden spurts of petulance, the lapses into inward-staring listlessness) at the same time as sensitively suggesting an innate and ineffable superiority of spirit.

His key saving grace is that he excoriates himself even more The eponymous hero of Chekhov's first-performed play Ivanov has been called "Hamlet of the Steppes" and is himself several times moved to invoke Shakespeare's hero. On the face of it, then, not a role calculated to extend the range of Ralph Fiennes, who gave a famous high-romantic account of Hamlet for the same director, Jonathan Kent, a couple of years back. Such an assumption, though, badly underestimates both Chekhov's drama (played here in David Hare's robustly persuasive new translation) and the leading actor. Until quite recently an energetic idealist, the 35-year-old Ivanov has sunk under the weight of his problems into a fagged-out despair. His state is running into ruinous debt; his wife (who cut herself off from her family to marry him) is dying of tuberculosis.

As Chekhov wrote to his friend Suvorin, people in this position "usually place all the blame on circumstances and enroll in the ranks of savagely than he is by his main detractor, Colin Tiemey's splendidly priggish young Dr Lvov. If Ivanov resembles Hamlet, Lvov, who is glaring offkiousness in a stiff collar, may put you in mind of Malvolio. His creepy tale-telling throws a flattering light on the hero's doubled-edged honesty. In a first-rate supporting cast, Bill Paterson beautifully hints at the thwarted humanity in the puce-faced, wife-dominated lush, Lebedev, while, standing in at short notice for an indisposed actor, Ian McDiarmid delivers a hilarious cameo as Kosykh, an elderly monothematic prima donna who bores people to near-suicide with blow-by-blow accounts of the card games he's played. Perhaps best of all, Oliver Ford Davies, growling like a bear with a sore head as Ivanov's uncle, gives vent to cascades of misanthropy that you can tell are his way of rousing himself from an even pro founder despair.

To SApriL Booking: 0171-359 4404 Paul Taylor superfluous people and But the dramatist, wanting to put a stop to literature that celebrates "whining, despondent" folk, here created a hero who has an active horror of falling into this stereotype. This may only succeed in making his mood worse but in Ivanov there's at least a candour and acceptance of responsibility. Fiennes 's excellent performance piercingly brings home to you the fact that the hero's problem is what we would now call clinical depression. At once burning with shame and self-contempt, and festering with anger and suppressed violence, a restless, dishevelled Fiennes lets you see the depressive's ultimate torture -the knowledge that there is nothing remotely ennobling in depression, and that the sun "shines regardless'' in the parallel world of the well. It's a very curious role because, in terms of what he actually does, there is little to distinguish Ivanov from the coarse Of THEATRE Swaggers BAC, London lip-service to a criminal code of honour and family loyalty that only John really believes in, and to a fastidious sexual morality (thoroughly modern Nancy, with her PVC dresses and psycho boyfriends, turns out to be saving herself for marriage).

The play is marred by some implausible plotting: we're expected to believe that Curly, Michael's superior, has been shot by rival gangsters and kept under armed guard in hospital and nobody in the shop knows anything about it. And Mahoney the director doesn't seem to know how to work the rhythms supplied by Mahoney the playwright; the dialogue often shambles when it should race, a lot of it getting lost altogether. The individual performances are fine particularly Peter Hugo Daly's amiable, canny John but they don't mesh together well. All the same, if you did spend your money, you wouldn't feel you'd been robbed. To 9 March.

Booking: 0171-223 2223 Robert Hanks business, refusing to face up to the fragility of it all a fragility neatly caught by John Howes's set, with its cardboard boxes stencilled with logos for CK, YSL and DKNY. So less, the manager, dreams of working for a solicitor in Camberwell, but won't make the break because she worries that the law is too precarious. Michael, her boss and lover, lives in a 250,000 house in Hampstead and fondly imagines he's an upwardly mobile businessman. Drop-dead gorgeous Nancy gets her kicks hanging out with gangsters. Only John, a legendary thug just out of jail, and Michael's sister-in-law Dee seem to have any sense of how chancy this way of life is.

There are a lot of things to admire in Mahoney's script: a strong sense of character; an ear for the low-life vernacular; some excellent gags like John's defence of boxing against the accusation that it causes brain damage not like they're going to miss out on the guy who's going to find a cure for And he paints a convincing picture of the fudged ethic that binds the characters together paying Plays about life among the. urban criminal classes have abounded in recent years now and then you find yourself longing for dramas that deal with the down-to-earth, real struggles of people who live in Hampstead and write novels. Still, at least Mick Mahoney can claim to know what he's talking about, having spent much of his youth hanging around with dubious company and getting into trouble with the law. Swaggers draws on his experiences working in a West End swag shop, the kind of place where you buy bootleg tapes, fake designer clothes, ersatz Cartier watches and computer accessories of doubtful provenance. In Ma honey's version, the shop is a place of staggering wealth deals are discussed in hundreds of thousands of pounds; vast wads of cash change hands but it's also a half-way house, a sort of interface between the criminal milieu and the workaday world (among other things, it's a way of laundering drug money).

And the staff are similarly caught between two stools, imagining that they're in a proper VISUAL ARTS Modem Art in Britain 1910-1914 Barbican Centre The theme of the Barbican Art Gallery's spring show "Modem Art in Britain 1910-1914" is the series of exhibitions of modem European art that were held in London in the four years immediately before the advent of the First World War. The two strands of the exhibition, the European pictures shown in London and the reaction by British artists who saw them, are neatly interwoven through eight roughly chronological rooms. Their combined aim, as the catalogue puts it, is "to contribute to the understanding of the ideas and excitements that shaped the formation of taste and the development of modernism in SB SWllUtW 1UVB 1VI 0U WA1IH1I1UU fflllVJl iu UIUWI VIVWl London in 191 1. Likewise, the little view of The Matisse Room at the Second Post Impressionist Exhibition (attributed to Roger Fry, but probably by Vanessa Bell) borrowed from the Musee d'Orsay in Paris shows the incredible depth of the 1912 exhibition but highlfehu the lack of a great Matisse in the Barbican's 1997 selection. The oddest omissions are British ones.

Where, for example, is Stanley Spencer, whose Apple Gatherers (in the Tate Gallery) is the most complete assimilation of Gauguin by any English artist at the time? Or CRW Nevinson? Acknowledged in the excellent catalogue as the maker of the first British Futurist painting, the only Fjiglihmpn to be fully absorbed into a modem European movement, but shown in the exhibition by a single work that pre-dates his Futurist tendencies. These gaps aside, there are some great pictures here and some very pleasing combinations. Roger Fry is shown under the influence of Cezanne, where he looks at ease, and Derain, where he does not; Epstein looks at home next to Modigliani; as does Wyndham Lewis with Picasso; Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell are more confident with Matisse than Kandinsky (their tentative experiments with collage and abstraction' don't quite come off) and Harold Gilman successfully blends his admiration for Van Gogh's colour with that for Vuillard's intimism. This is a thoroughly enjoyable exhibition, well worth the visit to London EC2 and the 430 ticket price, which also admits to a beautiful display of work by the potters Luck Rie and Hans Coper in the Barbican's lower gallery. To 26 May (0171-382 7105) Richard Ingleby subsidised hands would have been an excuse to gather the key works of the 20th century under one roof for one of the grandest shows of recent times.

Instead, the European selection is humble and the focus firmly on Britain. My initial instinct was that this was an opportunity missed, but taken as an exhibition of British painting with a few foreign pointers it is all the better for its modesty. The smaller and sometimes surprising talents of Sickert, Gilman and Gore would have been eclipsed by too many show-stoppers from Van Gogh, Picasso or Cezanne. That said, it is a shame that two or three other paintings couldn't have been squeezed in. They have borrowed a great Gauguin from the National Galleries of Scotland, but arguably it's the wrong one.

If they had included The Vision After the Sermon (also in the collection of National Galleries of Scotland) it could have been hung next to Spencer Gore's delightful record of Gaugubu and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery which shows it being admired on its first visit to The Drill Hall-Box OfTice B171 637 8270 11 CHENIES ST, WC1.