EDINBURGH FESTIVAL 2009 - REVIEW: THE YALTA GAME, Kings Theatre, September 1

Clare Maddox

The Yalta Game forms part of the Edinburgh International Festival's three-play retrospective of the work of renowned Irish playwright Brian Friel. Based on Chekhov's famous short story The Lady and the Dog (which made a previous excursion into contemporary popular imagination last year in the Kate Winslet illiterate-Nazi thriller The Reader) it expands on the characters of the tale's two protagonists, Dmitri and Anna, and fleshes out the timeless themes of love, illusion and the nature of humanity.

The spartan stage set - empty chairs as a stark representation of loss, amid the air of better days gone by that permeates the Kings Theatre - is a world away from the sumptuous stagecraft of lavish EIF productions such as Optimism. However, Friel's play is not about surface gloss, but the vagaries of the human heart, which the two actors need no accompanying bells and whistles to communicate.

The Yalta game is the I-spy diversion the wealthy tourists use to pass the time, and the audience soon becomes a part of it. There's a playful tone amid the wistfulness and yearning, as Friel asks us to judge just where the thin line lies between truth and fiction. After the end of his romantic encounter with Anna in Yalta, Dmitri turns to the audience and asks in poignant supplication, "Did it ever really happen at all?" Friel uses the dog of the story's title, which Dmitri names Yalta, to illuminate our capacity for believing in illusions: we accept that it's there on stage, until Dmitri punctures our willing suspension of disbelief by pointing out that there's clearly no dog there at all.

Friel's play is an hour of delightful character exploration, and Risteárd Cooper and Rebecca O'Mara skilfully bring Chekhov's tale to heart-wrenching, all-too-human life.