NT : Go Backstage : Platform Papers : Vera Gottlieb
Vera Gottlieb
Rough ChekovPicture, if you will, a small Studio theatre off the Champs-Elysees in Paris. 1965. I was a drama student and going to see a production of The Cherry Orchard adapted, directed and performed by Sasha Pitoeff, son of the Russian emigres Georges and Ludmila Pitoeff (or Pitoyev). First in Geneva and then in Paris, they had introduced the French-speaking public to Chekhov's plays in the 1920s and 1930s - an introduction and interpretation inseparable from their own personal circumstances as Russian emigrés.
The foyer, when entering, was darker than outside. And an even darker small auditorium. We groped for our seats but although the performance was due to begin, nothing happened. We waited. And waited. It seemed 10 minutes went by. The small audience grew restive. Then eventually the darkened auditorium grew darker, and a faint light crept up on stage. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the stage light came up - but stopped in half-light. A pause. Then a dimly discernible figure seemed to move slowly through the process of waking up. Stretched. Yawned. And again. And we, the audience, also yawned. Lopakhin eventually got up from a chair. Stretched. And yawned. He then seemed to slowly limber up. Then nothing. Eventually a young girl came on very slowly (Dunyasha) - and yawned. And we yawned. Finally, Lopakhin said (inverting Chekhov's lines): `What time is it? (Squinting at his watch). Thank God (crossing himself). The train's arrived.' In the original, Dunyasha's line `It's already light' as she blew out a candle, was altered to: `It's getting light' - and the candle stayed lit. That first page of Chekhov's script took 12 minutes - the production as a whole took nearly 5 hours; some of the audience were asleep from the beginning, and someone behind me wondered whether the lights had lost power in that Quarter of Paris.
This was Deadly Theatre - Deadly Chekhov. Enough to put anyone off his work for ever! Slow. Self-indulgent, and impossible to play as a comedy if only because of the unrelenting gloom, confirming the old adage of always playing comedy both fast and in bright light. Fortunately the French audience were subsequently given a quite different Chekhov at the various hands of Michel Saint-Denis, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Jean Vilar, while in the 1980s Antoine Vitez, and Peter Brook, took Chekhov into the Rough Theatre of Brook's own classification - alive, bright, faster, keeping the audience awake!
This - albeit parodied description - was not confined to the Pitoeff company in France. A similar deadly approach happened in England, and it was not until the 1970s that approaches changed. This `deadly' interpretation has been variously described - and always linked to the current philosophy of the day. Thus in 1935, Ivor Brown wrote:
Was not Chekhov, after all, a kind of sublime crooner, continually cultivating his Muscovite Blues? And may not that be the reason why, neglected in England for a quarter of a century, he recently became `box-office'? He spoke for the defeated, for the self-pitying, for the parlour philosophers whose babbling of -isms and -ologies is only a veil for inertia. The mood of our English nineteen-twenties was doleful enough. Rich girls had to be pitied for their poverty, and popular melody was all boo-hoo-hoos and blue-hue-hues. Self-pity was the note and sourness the flavour ... But the young people of the nineteen-twenties and thirties ... could be far more responsive to Chekhov's compassionate studies of defeatism, his [1] gave them just their cup of tea ...[1]
The point is also clearly demonstrated in Caryl Brahms' article in The Times (23 May) in 1966:
The English, in their productions, have taken over Chekhov. They have hung his drawing rooms with their own decently faded chintzes. They have peopled his decaying estates with Aunt Lillians and Uncle Vincents ... the peasant as quaint as those toy-shop Russian families; brightly painted wooden Papoushkas and Mamoushkas complete with facsimiles in dwindling scale ... .
The `dwindling scale' relates not only to class but also to location:
Moscow, Kharkov, St Petersburg - why, are they not quite simply Maidstone, Cheltenham, Edinburgh? Indeed when the Moscow Arts Theatre plays Chekhov we half resent it. They all seem so vulgar - without Dame Edith, and Miss [Athene] Seyler, and Sir John [Gielgud].[2]
This `naturalisation' process created `a dwindling scale', trivialised the ideas in the plays, and politicised - or rather depoliticised - them in a British context. Changes always happen, must happen, when a dramatist from one culture is transposed to another, but what happened to Chekhov's work has only recently been rectified, a process made much easier through versions and adaptations than through translation. Literal translations are usually done in the British theatre by a Russian speaker, then followed by a reworking by a major dramatist, or by Michael Frayn's `translations' which take some considerable but not always obvious liberties with the original.[3] But the fact remains that few in England could find comedy in the `dispossession' from their homes of the landed gentry; attitudes were strongly coloured by the prevalent attitude of hindsight throughout the 20s and 30s to the 1917 Russian Revolution - and the plays were largely read as if the characters were all tragic victims swept into the dustbin of history. The fact that Lopakhin does everything he can - strongly emphasised in Nunn's current production - to help save the estate for Raneveskaya and Gayev and that their personal `tragedy' was in part avoidable, has been ignored completely in most productions until and even after the 1970s. Instead, the emphasis on gloom, on `the Slav soul' seemed reinforced by the translation in the inter-war years of Chekhov's stories, of Dostoyevsky, and Gogol (largely by Constance Garnett) in which English views of Russian impotence, philosophising and `Slavic angst' seemed confirmed by Chekhov's plays. The emphasis was on `tragic character' to the virtual exclusion of `social comedy'. Again and again the plays were produced either as doom and gloom - or trivialised as in the Russian emigré director Theodore Komisarjevsky's edited productions between 1925 and 1936 - a trivialisation summed up by his famous comment that `The English public always demand a love interest'.
A further influential factor on this interpretation of Chekhov was the mistaken influence and misunderstanding of Stanislavsky: character exploration rather than investigation of the ideas in the plays. This was also due to the American mistranslations into English of Stanislavsky's writings which have only recently and in part been corrected by the work of Jean Benedetti. Time does not permit deeper explanation of the ins and outs of the copyright mess which forbade new translation, but this was linked to an assumption that Stanislavsky's MAT productions were the definitive ones, ignoring the massive evidence in Chekhov's letters of his deep unhappiness with Stanislavsky's interpretations [4] - including such major aspects as the original casting of Ranevskaya who he saw as both `an elderly woman' and `a silly woman'; that Lopakhin must be played sensitively; that Varya is the only `cry-baby' in the play and is `a silly girl' (the part he wanted his actress wife Olga Knipper to play), and that the direction `through tears' was often an indication of the characters' sentimentality or self-dramatisation. Chekhov was therefore furious when he heard that the MAT cast wept at the first reading of the play. A further and major point of conflict which to this day has still not been achieved is the issue of pace - Chekhov stated that the last act of The Cherry Orchard should take only 12 minutes, and not the customary 40 minutes, or more! The effect of the moment of stillness when they all sit in silence before departure (a Russian custom before parting) would be all the more telling in the midst of a rapidly paced 12-minute act full of the hustle and bustle of packing! There were other major areas of conflict, the most significant of which is the whole `tone' of the play: Chekhov called it `a comedy'. Stanislavsky failed both to understand this - or to achieve it.
The comic aspects of social-Chekhov awaited discovery in Britain until the 1970s, and in England few had heard at the time of Vakhtangov's 1921 `fantastic realist' production of the one-act The Wedding, or Meyerhold's 1935 experiment with The Bear, The Proposal and Jubilee [5] under the title 33 Swoons - so-called because Meyerhold counted 33 fainting-fits across the 3 plays! Equally, few had heard of Tairov's 1944-45 black and white symbolist Seagull. The one-act plays were seen as farces, albeit played up in the English physical form of farce - like Michael Frayn's, Alan Ayckbourn's or, earlier, Charley's Aunt. But the Shakespearean or Beckettian philosphical, even metaphysical sense (`Why this farce, day after day?') did not permeate through the productions until the 1970s and in some senses, has still not fully informed the reading of the full-length plays.
It was Kenneth Tynan who (as so often) really understood the thematic point and sense of a play:
We have remade Chekhov's last play in our image just as drastically as the Germans have remade Hamlet in theirs. Our Cherry Orchard is a pathetic symphony, to be played in a mood of elegy. We invest it with a nostalgia for the past which, though it runs right through our culture, is alien to Chekhov's. His people are country gentry: we make them into decadent aristocrats.
Next, we romanticise them. Their silliness becomes pitiable grotesquerie; and at this point our hearts warm to them. They are not Russians at all: they belong in the great line of English eccentrics. The upstart Lopakhin, who buys up their heritage, cannot be other than a barbarous bounder. Having foisted on Chekhov a collection of patrician mental cases, we then congratulate him on having achieved honorary English citizenship. [6]
At the heart of Chekhov's comedy lies the ironic treatment of a leitmotif or theme running throughout much of Russian literature - the theme of `banality' or `drabness'. Peter Brook refers to it obliquely in The Empty Space where he places Chekhov in the chapter Rough Theatre, but he also refers to him in the chapter The Holy Theatre in which he links Shakespeare and Chekhov. There Brook refers to Three Sisters in the same sentence as Hamlet and clearly states that Chekhov `performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives [audiences] a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all.' [7]
Chekhov's plays are exactly about `drabness'. The Russian word `poshlost' is virtually untranslatable, but describes a way of life which many Russian writers have depicted: the mundane, the trivial, the banal, the drab. But his purpose was exposure - not detailed uncritical reproduction. And when we get mere reproduction - as if Beckett in Waiting for Godot had simply expected his audience to wait without being entertained, to wait without the game-playing that Vladimir and Estragon perform to help themselves (and the audience) pass the time - then we are back to Deadly Chekhov. Or Deadly Beckett! All of Chekhov's dramatic techniques are utilised to reveal the mundane, to demonstrate that people's lives are not necessarily inevitable, that we are not always tragic and impotent victims of a fate we cannot control, and that what the English poet Coleridge called `the lethargy of custom' may, sometimes, be alterable by action.
It is, I think, highly significant that Michael Frayn, the major English `translator' or more accurately, adaptor of Chekhov's plays today, wrote with reference to Three Sisters that: `our lives are poisoned by hope.' [8] This underlies the way Frayn interprets Chekhov's characters -and the plays as a whole. A major philsophical stance! I would suggest that quite the reverse is true. To quote Beckett again: `Hope deferred maketh the something sick' [9] [my emphasis]. We have to go on `waiting for Godot' or `something' - or there is no point to life. Chekhov said it himself very clearly in a number of letters - he said it simply through the Russian phrase: `tak zhit nelzya' - `it is impossible to live like this'! He refutes the idea of accepting `that which is' (and with it, refutes the accepting status quo organic to naturalism), and ensures that his plays allow for the suggestion of `that which need not be'- and also what `could be'. As he put it in a famous and often-quoted letter to his publisher (to Suvorin, 25 November 1892) on the question of art and writers:
The best of them are realists and depict life as it is, but because every line they write is permeated, as with a juice, by a consciousness of an aim, you feel in addition to life as it is, also life as it should be, and it is that which delights you.
Obviously Chekhov always had a consciousness of an aim - and that aim was not what Ivor Brown called `compassionate studies in defeatism'. [10] His use of comedy is therefore both a denial of the inevitability of some kinds of tragedy (albeit not the inevitability of time passing, or of death), and a method of assessing his characters objectively - and hence their responsibility for their lives. This objective assessment functions at one and the same time politically and psychologically: human potential is always related to the individual character's aspirations and limitations. It is Gayev's limitation, emphasised clearly by Nunn, by Corin Redgrave's Gayev and Stephen Moore's Firs - that he never grew up and, in this production, [11] is such a snob! It is Ranevskaya's limitation - however charming she is - again clearly brought out by David Lan's translation, by Nunn and Vanessa Redgrave, that she cannot face reality. Can only look back with nostalgia, and if not forward in hope, then at least with realism in facing the necessity of action. Their lack of maturity, their insularity from adult challenges and responsibilities is nicely stressed by Maria Bjornson's extension of the nursery setting in her use of a playing-pen, the rocking horse, and other `toys', but there are no actual children here.
There are always ambiguities and, in form, there is duality - as Irving Wardle so aptly put it as far back as 1973: `It seems to me that British Chekhov generally suffers from the same complaint as British farce. We cannot hold a balance between sympathetic involvement and comic detachment' (The Times, 1973). This is where the plays are serio-comic, if not tragi-comic. In his stage directions Chekhov often indicated `through tears' even while a character - or we - are laughing. And Chekhov's use of farce contains this same duality: physical and philosophical. Thus poor Yepikhodov, or `101 Misfortunes' is not simply comic. Even as we laugh, we must realise that his whole life is a torment of misfortunes. Like Lucky in Godot, Yepikhodov is unlucky. [12] It is a statement on quality of life if someone cannot even have a glass of beer without finding a beetle at the bottom of the glass. In Act Two the governess, Carlotta Ivanovna, sits with nobody listening to her, exposing her vulnerability, her isolation, her rootlessness - and then takes a bite from a gherkin. Chekhov undercuts the serious with a comic gesture, interruption, action, or even a sound - or he `inflates' the farcically comic by using montage as an effect. Conversely, the comic or farcical is followed by the serious -as in the failed `proposal' between Lopakhin and Varya. Varya's hope of a better life is destroyed by that comic moment, and Lopakhin's search for his galoshes - an awkward `cover' to get himself out of the situation.
Equally, in Act Three Lopakhin's triumphant entrance as the new owner of the estate is totally deflated by Varya's accidental blow to Lopakhin's head. Trofimov's words and ideas may/must be taken seriously even while he, himself, is sometimes ridiculous - and humourless. Declaiming to Ranevskaya that he is `above love' he exits pompously - only to fall down the stairs! Or Chekhov uses the stock conventional comic device of `comedy of the deaf' - but as in life, people rarely listen to each other and so a serious, sometimes tragic, point is made. Ranevskaya and Gayev are incapable of listening, partly because of their class attitudes and assumptions, to what Lopakhin - the son of a serf and now the symbolic `time-keeper' throughout the play - is trying to tell them. But if one looks at each of them at the end, few characters end `tragically': the idea of Gayev working in a bank is grotesquely ironic; Ranevskaya will return to her lover in Paris; Lopakhin will build and prosper - after all, in 1904 Chekhov did not know that a Revolution would happen in 1917. [13] Anya and Trofimov go off facing life with hope - although any knowledge of that period in Russia underlines the reality that Trofimov will either never finish university given his political activities, or may even be arrested. It is crucial to remember that all these plays were written under the tightest censorship, often requiring major rewrites before performance was granted - and decoding on the part of the audience was commonplace in Tzarist Russia (as later!). As Chekhov put it: `It's like writing with a bone stuck in one's throat'.
As for some of the other characters: Simeonov-Pishchik is saved by the English discovery of clay on his land; but Varya will work in some one else's home; Carlotta's future is quite uncertain and dependent on Lopakhin's charity, while old Firs - whose time has passed, like the cherry orchard - will die, whether at the end of the play, or eventually. But Chekhov was always precise: had he wished Firs to die on stage, he would have written so. The moment is a symbolic one - the image is more important than the literal, and emphasised by the repetition of the strange (industrial) sound from Act Two.
This strange sound, like the entrance of the Tramp in Act Two, and like the very setting of Act Two which is not only outside the house but outside the whole estate and orchard, with the town and telegraph poles visible, suggest the present and the future with remnants of the past in the old shrine. This strongly emphasises the world beyond - a suggestion of scale only hinted at by Bjornson's design in Nunn's production. As in the rest of the play, as in all of the full-length plays and some of the one-act plays, the visual is often image and symbol, not the naturalistic depiction of that which `is' - to use Emile Zola's definition of Naturalism.
And this too is organic to the play's meaning and intent. As Trofimov says: `All of Russia is our orchard' - demonstrated visually by Chekhov in Act Two.
This recognition of symbol, image, the non-naturalistic, the comic, and the need to redefine, started in the 1970s. It was radically achieved by the great Russian director, Anatoly Efros, in his iconoclastic and highly controversial Cherry Orchard at Moscow's Taganka Theatre in 1975, designed by Valery Levental. The set was surrounded by billowing white curtains, family portraits strewn around and centre-stage, a graveyard with remnants of a `Chekhovian home' lying on the graves. In the same year came Lindsay Anderson's Seagull - a change from the usual British Chekhov in playing up the comedy, but it was also in 1977 that Trevor Griffiths' version of The Cherry Orchard, first directed by Richard Eyre in Nottingham, raised some critics to a fever-pitch of rage at the `politicisation' of `their' play. Griffiths made his interpretation absolutely clear, and the following quotation unequivically expresses some of my own thoughts:
For half a century now, in England as elsewhere, Chekhov has been the almost exclusive property of theatrical class sectaries for whom the plays have been plangent and sorrowing evocations of an `ordered' past no longer with `us', its passing greatly to be mourned. For theatregoers ... Chekhov's tough, bright-eyed complexity was dulced into swallowable sacs of sentimental morality ... Translation followed translation, that idiom became `our' idiom, that class `our' class, until the play's specific historicity and precise sociological imagination had been bleached of all meanings beyond those required to convey the necessary `natural' sense that the fine will always be undermined by the crude and that the `human condition' can for all essential purposes be equated with `the plight of the middle classes'. [14]
In life and so in theatre, comedy often arises from the disparity between a person or character's perception of the world - and the world as it is. The greater the disparity, the greater the comedy until, or unless, it tips into madness. And it is here that Ranevskaya and Gayev provide a particular form of comedy. This, too, was played up in Jonathan Miller's 1976 Three Sisters where the aspiration to go to Moscow was clearly thwarted only by the sisters themselves; likewise, Miller's interpretation suggested that it is not where you are, but what you do with what you have which determines quality of life.
From the 1970s to the present, a spate of `rough' Chekhov productions marked a major change in British Chekhov. Time permits only a mention, or list, but all in different ways are too significant to ignore: Peter Gill's revolutionary 1978 Cherry Orchard at the Riverside Studios, London, from a literal translation by Ted Braun, set the play on bare wooden boards, paring away anything extraneous; Yuri Lyubimov's Three Sisters at Moscow's Taganka Theatre, 1981 (a production which again enraged some Russian purists who abhored the non-naturalistic approach). There was Thomas Kilroy's fascinating 1981 Seagull, setting the play in Ireland - a version, not translation, which then transferred to London's Royal Court, directed by Max Stafford Clark; and then Peter Brook's own Cherry Orchard at his Paris Bouffe du Nord, started in 1981 and first performed in 1983, which toured to the States, around Europe and to Moscow, with a set consisting largely of his famous carpet and a few props - and the metaphysical stress on life, death, and the timelessness of the play.
In 1981, Mike Alfreds directed his Seagull; in 1982 and 1985, The Cherry Orchard, and in 1986, Three Sisters - all productions in which action and thus comedy emanated from the actors, stressing the characters - and hence their responsibility for their own lives. In 1984 Michael Frayn cleverly adapted Chekhov's untitled play, Platonov, as Wild Honey, staged here at the National with Ian McKellen; in 1988 there was a major reinterpretation of Three Sisters as Trinidad Sisters by Mustapha Matura, at London's Donmar Warehouse, directed by Nicolas Kent - like Kilroy, taking the play into a completely different location (Trinidad) and culture, an approach which also worked in 1994 with the Antony Hopkins and Julian Mitchell version of Uncle Vanya - set in Wales with the title, August; and Michael Blakemore's 1995 Australian Uncle Vanya, retitled Country Life.
In 1990 Trevor Griffiths took adaptation into a different dimension: using the filmscript (by Adabachian) of the original Russian film An Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano directed by Nikita Mikhalkov, he wrote Piano, performed here at the Cottesloe in 1990, directed by Howard Davies - another version of the untitled Platonov. And effectively created a `new' Chekhov play. Also in 1990 the Georgian director of the Tiblisi Rustaveli Company, Robert Sturua, did a guest production of Three Sisters in London, with Vanessa, Lynn and Jemma Redgrave. In the same year, the Cusack sisters did their own Three Sisters. Thus the combination of Vanessa and Corin as brother and sister in Nunn's current Cherry Orchard has followed through `sibling' Chekhov. Most recently has been Janet Suzman's The Free State - a successful `South African Response' to The Cherry Orchard, setting the play in 1994 in the eastern Free State after the democratic elections and the end of apartheid: `Chekhov's enduring themes of change, time, and family fidelity take on new resonances' in a radical adaptation which becomes both a new political play and a reworking of Chekhov which demonstrates, like Matura, Griffiths, Kilroy, Hopkins and Mitchell, and Blakemore, that the plays are ambivalent and tough enough to take radical re-appraisal and offer living contemporary perceptions of Chekhov's work.
There are other, major, productions which I have not mentioned - but only through lack of time. There have been productions in which the director and designer have retained the period setting, have brought out the ideas of the plays, and played up the comedy. It is not essential to completely tranpose the play to get `rough' Chekhov: productions by Oleg Yefremov at the MAT, Lev Dodin in Petersburg, Peter Stein, the Greek director Yannis Kokkos, or this current production by Nunn in which perhaps the most radical reappraisal has been the treatment of Lopakhin as a decent, sensitive man in love with Raneveskaya and desparate to help - and with Trofimov taken equally seriously in terms of what he actually says about Russia. Adaptation and versions offer the most radical re-appraisal, but to the best of my knowledge we still await a fast, serio-comic, play of ideas - a social comedy - in which `the farcical' elements become philsophical, and not only a matter of form, technique, style. A production of the play which runs for about 2 hours would be novel indeed - and the use of the period setting (the `norm' of productions) retains the specific historicity while allowing the parallels to other periods and locations to emerge by the intelligent `pointing' of the enduring themes. We know from 400 years of Shakespearean production that Romeo and Juliet can work as profoundly when set in Verona - or in New York's West Side Story. One need not, should not, exclude the other, and audience intelligence readily draws parallels. In this sense, Nunn's production - like Yannis Kokkos, Peter Stein, Sam Mendes and Lev Dodin (or Adolphe Shapiro, Anthony Page, or Leonid Heifetz) - provokes the ideas, relationships - and wider references. So this has, in part, be done - but I cannot help feeling that the key is the pace, and so far the hectic pace of farce has not yet been attempted. But, to be clear, I certainly do not mean naturalistic Chekhov: I mean realism - which allows of symbol, image, metaphor, along with character detail and ensemble playing without losing the various kinds of comedy in The Cherry Orchard, whether irony, parody, farce, the grotesque and even the surreal. What would The Cherry Orchard be like if played as fast as Feydeau, or Labiche? It remains to be tried.
In the last 4 years there have been 5 major Chekhov productions, and by some of our greatest European directors: by Sam Mendes, by Lev Dodin, by Peter Stein, Adrian Noble -and now Trevor Nunn. There have been 4 productions of The Cherry Orchard in as many years. And Nunn and Lan's Cherry Orchard is the 4th at The National Theatre in 27 years.
According to The Independent (22 September 2000): `Polls for the greatest play of the 20th century regularly placed The Cherry Orchard at the top' - perhaps the critic Alistair Macaulay is right when he wrote in the same review: `Has any play ever so perfectly caught the end of one era and the dawn of another?' The play for the Millennium? But there is another point which must be made, and which relates to all of Chekhov's plays: like Shakespeare's, they are inexhaustible. And they are quite tough enough to take endless reinterpretations, re-locations, and ideas which remain both social - and metaphysical. In addition to Brook, others have made the point about Shakespeare and Chekhov, most recently Trevor Nunn himself, and the major Russian critic and Chekhov scholar, Tatiana Shakh-Azizova. [15]
This linkage, I would suggest, is exactly because of their serio-comic duality; because of their genuine ambiguities, and because we do both sympathise and observe detachedly at one and the same time, and because (to rephrase a point first made about Beckett: `we as audience are Chekhov characters in a Chekhov situation'. The plays are deeply personal, but also social and political. A further major reason is their accessibility when played as rough or popular theatre - as Peter Brook puts it: `anti-authoritarian, anti-tradition, anti-pomp, anti-pretence' (p.89). Placing his main analysis of Chekhov in his chapter in The Empty Space called Rough Theatre, Peter Brook wrote:
It is an easy mistake to consider Chekhov as a naturalistic writer, and in fact many of the sloppiest and thinnest plays of recent years called `slice of life' fondly think themselves Chekhovian. Chekhov never just made a slice of life - he was a doctor who with infinite gentleness and care took thousands and thousands of fine layers off life. These he cultured, and then arranged them in an exquisitely cunning, completely artificial and meaningful order in which part of the cunning lay in so disguising the artifice that the result looked like the keyhole view it never had been. Any page of The Three Sisters gives the impression of life unfolding as though a tape-recorder had been left running. If examined carefully it will be seen to be built of coincidences as great as in Feydeau - the vase of flowers that overturns, the fire-engine that passes at just the right moment; the word, the interruption, the distant music, the sound in the wings, the entrance, the farewell - touch by touch, they create through the language of illusions an overall illusion of a slice of life. This series of impressions is equally a series of alienations: each rupture is a subtle provocation and a call to thought. [16]
Chekhov uses farce to expose the farcical; he uses melodrama to objectify, invert and so subvert the melodramatic; he uses irony; traditional comic devices like love triangles (particularly in Seagull but also in Uncle Vanya and Cherry Orchard); in his hands `the conversation of the deaf', a stock comic device, becomes the inability to listen, to communicate properly; he uses the conventional pistol shot in every full-length play except in Cherry Orchard, but completely inverts and so subverts the device in Uncle Vanya. There are many other examples of his use of popular theatre techniques - as with Yasha, utilising the stock character of the `inflated servant'. But in all of his mature plays he uses a structural device which works as montage, as juxtaposition - clearly illustrated in Act Three with several simultaneous centres of action, one commenting on another, creating both what came to be called Brechtian `distancing' or `alienation' and a duality which Trevor Griffiths described as `the subjectively painful and the objectively comic'. [17]
Time and again Chekhov undercuts the pompous, the over-dramatic, the sermonising, or any character who takes him/herself too seriously. Chekhov's purpose was not to write sermons -he is one of the least didactic and most `absent' of authors in his own plays, with few villains or dislikable characters (perhaps only Serebriakov in Uncle Vanya, Natasha in Three Sisters, Yasha in Cherry Orchard), but that he had a purpose, and a serious one, is undeniable. It was to suggest that perhaps we live badly - that we could live differently. As Lopakhin says: `The Lord has given us these huge forests, these boundless plains, these vast horizons, and we who live among them ought to be real giants' [18] - Lopakhin's philosophy which is not simply that of a materialist, counterpointing Trofimov's angry denunciation of the degradation and exploitation of the poor. Ranevskaya's and Gayev's personal tragedy or sorrow was a social necessity. The orchard is very beautiful, but the trees no longer produce cherries - and they have lost the recipe for the cherry jam. And there are urgent ecological issues running throughout much of Chekhov's work.
Describing Bertolt Brecht's `alienation' devices, Brook makes a point which can readily be applied to rough Chekhov, to his theatrical techniques and purpose:
The first alienation device I ever saw was as a child, in a Swedish church; the collection bag had a spike on it to nudge those of the congregation whom the sermon had sent to sleep. [19]
Only with deadly Chekhov would his plays seem like a sermon; only with the deadly Chekhov I described at the beginning is there any danger of falling asleep. If the production uses Chekhov's `spikes' (whether in a period setting or located in Australia), then we are not only nudged awake in the theatre, but perhaps also in our daily lives which are not so dissimilar from those of Chekhov's characters. Henrik Ibsen said: `My task is not to answer. My task is but to question' - similarly, Chekhov only ever raises questions, and then often obliquely, implicitly. But as he said: `Tak zhit nelzya. It is impossible to live like this'. Perhaps neither can we?
Vera Gottlieb
7 March 2001 - Olivier Theatre.
References
[1] .. Quoted in Chekhov on the British Stage, ed. Patrick Miles, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, chapter 13, Vera Gottlieb `The Dwindling Scale': The Politics of British Chekhov, p.150.
[2].. Ibid., p.152.
[3].. Frayn's translation in Uncle Vanya changes the feeling of the action in Act 3 when Vanya attempts to shoot Serebriakov and misses. By adding the line `Another failure?', Frayn both elongates the action - and removes ambiguity. It is interesting to compare Ronald Hingley's literal translation in The Oxford Chekhov, London, 1964, Vol.III, p.57, with Michael Frayn's Chekhov Plays, Methuen, London, 1988, p.171. In Frayn, Vanya `Hammers on the floor with the revolver', a repetitive action making him seem ridiculous, while Hingley translates accurately: `Vanya bangs the revolver on the floor'. It is essential that Vanya is not just ridiculous - but desparate.
[4].. See Ronald Hingley, The Oxford Chekhov, London, 1964, Vol.III, Appendix II; various scholars' selections of Letters, in addition to Hingley, A New Life of Chekhov, Oxford University Press, London, 1976, and Edward Braun's The Director and the Stage, Methuen, London, 1982, Chapter 5, Stanislavsky and Chekhov.
[5].. See Konstantin Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, trans. George Petrov, ed. Sidney Schultze, Ardis, Ann Arbor, USA, 1981, and Vera Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville, CUP, Cambridge, 1982.
[6].. Kenneth Tynan, Tynan on Theatre, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1958, p.273, and quoted in Vera Gottlieb, Chekhov in limbo: British productions of the plays of Chekhov, in Hanna Scolnikov and Peter Holland, eds., The Play Out of Context, Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, CUP, Cambridge, 1989.
[7].. Peter Brook, The Empty Space, Pelican Books, Harmondsworth, 1972, p.48.
[8].. For a longer discussion of this point see Vera Gottlieb, Why this Farce? in NTQ, No.27, Vol.VII, August 1991, p.224.
[9].. Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, A Faber Paperback, Faber & Faber, Ltd., London, second edition 1965, Act 1, p.10.
[10].. Ivor Brown in The Observer, 17 November 1935, and quoted in Victor Emeljanow, ed., Chekhov, The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1981, p.385.
[11].. Trevor Nunn's production of The Cherry Orchard opened at the NT's Cottesloe in September 2000, and then transferred to the Olivier. David Lan wrote a new version of the play, and the cast includes Vanessa Redgrave (Ranevskaya), Corin Redgrave (Gaev), Roger Allam (Lopakhin), Eve Best (Varya), Ben Miles (Trofimov), Suzanne Bertish (Charlotta) and Michael Bryant (Firs). The design is by Maria Bjornson.
[12].. The point is overtly made in Beckett's Endgame by Nell: `Nothing is funnier than unhappiness...', Faber & Faber, London, 1958, p.20.
[13].. Or indeed the following year with the failure of the 1905 uprising.
[14].. Trevor Griffiths' introduction to The Cherry Orchard: A New English Version, Pluto Press, 1978, p.v.
[15].. See Tatiana Shakh-Azizova's opening to her chapter Chekhov on the Russian Stage, in The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, CUP, Cambridge, 2000, p.162.
[16].. Peter Brook, The Empty Space, Pelican Books, Harmondsworth, 1968, p.89.
[17] .. Quoted in Patrick Miles, ed., Chekhov on the British Stage, CUP, Cambridge, 1993, p.154.
[18] .. Ronald Hingley's translation and edition, The Oxford Chekhov, Vol.III, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Wood Demon, London, 1964, The Cherry Orchard, Act Two, p.170.
[19] .. Peter Brook, The Empty Space, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, 1968, p.82.