Anton Chekhov

The enfant terrible of Russian Chekhov directors has been Anatoly Efros, who stirred up a terrific controversy in 1966 with his The Seagull at the Lenin-Komsomol Theatre in Moscow. It emphasised two typical post-war themes: idealistic youth having to compromise with adult life, and the incompatibility of talent with fakery. V. Smirnitsky's Treplyov was active, restless and childlike, the nexus of the play; while the rest of the characters, adrift and frustrated, were nasty to each other in a vicious, strident manner. This note was struck more loudly in Efros's Three Sisters (Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, Moscow, 1967), a staging without half-tones: every petty grievance exploded into a loud quarrel or scandal. Motivation was, as a rule, sexual: Natasha had needs which frigid Andrey could not meet, so she was justified in taking a lover; Irina was a capricious demi-vierge, Masha a coarse predator, Olga repressed and repressive. Efros came back to Chekhov in 1975 with an iconoclastic The Cherry Orchard (Taganka, Moscow): the unit set suggested a graveyard hemmed in by billowing window-curtains and family portraits. The characters were seen as highstrung neurotics, an increasingly popular notion with contemporary Soviet directors.

This tendency came to a head in the Taganka's Three Sisters directed by Yury Lyubimov. The play began by sliding open a wall of the theatre to reveal a military band and the Moscow street outside the building; when closed, the wall's mirrored surface threw the audience's image back in its face. This opening statement more than hinted that the sisters' plight was a contemporary one with existential overtones. The characters, isolated from one another, wandered desolately about until they banged into the sheet-metal wall engraved with iconic figures. Such extreme re-interpretations of Chekhov were meaningful when set against the Moscow Art Theatre tradition. Russian critics and spectators could savour and analyse the divagation from the orthodox renditions. Most often, they would condemn it as wilfully perverse; occasionally, they would welcome a new revelation of meaning.

A recent adaptation of Chekhov's themes to modern Soviet life is Vladimir Arro's Look Who's Come (1982), in which a famous writer's widow resolves to sell his dacha to a troika of vulgarians: a hairdresser, a bartender and a bathhouse attendant. Despite good reviews and responsive audiences, the government forced the author to alter the ending: the suicide of a dacha resident was replaced by the deus ex machina of a phone call, cancelling the sale. Soviet censorship prefers its Chekhovs to deal in happy endings.

In the English-speaking world, Chekhov's acceptance was not immediate, though now he has attained the status of a classic: no respectable repertory theatre considers itself fully fledged until it has tested itself in one of his four masterpieces. During the course of this assimilation, Chekhov received some enduring and often misleading interpretations. First taken to be a purveyor of gloom and doom, he has, as Spencer Golub notes, 'been ennobled by age ... He is as soothing and reassuring as the useless valerian drops dispensed by the doctors in his plays ... an article of faith, like all stereotypes . . . the Santa Claus of dramatic literature . . .'⁷ How this falsely benign image took shape is worth examining.

British productions got off to a good start with The

Seagull at the Glasgow Repertory Theatre (November 1908). Its translator and director, the knowledgeable George Calderon, declared that 'a play of Tchekhof is a reverie, not a concatenation of events'; insistent that Chekhov's plays went beyond mere naturalism, he stressed what reviewers deemed the play's 'Ibsenite symbolism'.⁸ He also compensated for British actors' inability to main­tain an inner life when not speaking lines, by stressing the transitions between group mood and individual reactions. The result was impressive.

Unfortunately, the first London Chekhov was less prop­itious. Its sponsor, George Bernard Shaw, characterised the Stage Society Cherry Orchard (1911) as 'the most important [opening] in England since that of A Doll's House'.⁹ But the Stage Society was primed for social messages and dramas of reform; it and its public were baffled by the characters' self-involvement and assumed that the play was an emanation of some mythical Slavic soul. They judged it against the standard of the well-made problem play, and took Lopakhin to be a brutish villain, the Gayev family charming victims and Yepikhodov as the 'raisonneur'. Shaw felt compelled to adopt the Chekhovian ethos to his own messianic ends in Heartbreak House (1919). It was not until after the Great War that British audiences discovered a rapport with Chekhov.