Anton Chekhov

The first real impetus to abrogating Stanislavsky's sovereignty came from Eastern Europe. In the West, a number of gifted directors - Georges Pitoeff, Jean-Louis Barrault, Giorgio Strehler, Luchino Visconti, Peter Zadek -had offered persuasive presentations of Chekhov without enunciating a new aesthetic. Informed by national tradi­tions of fantastic allegory and satire, Eastern European directors broke through the fourth-wall illusion to present a colder, less psychologised ambience. The Czech Otomar Krejca was the first to discard the illusionistic box set for The Seagull, by having Josef Svoboda project impressionis­tic images on the back wall. The Rumanian Lucian Pintilie, working in France and the United States, surrounded his Seagull with gigantic mylar screens to illuminate the characters' narcissism, and made Treplyov's platform stage the central metaphor of the performance.

The Rumanian Andrei Serban has been the most con­troversial of these innovators, since much of his work has been done in the more conservative New York theatre. His Cherry Orchard (New York Publick Theatre, 1977) was filled with visual metaphors set against a luminous cyc- lorama: a cage-like ballroom; a plough dragged across a field by peasants; at the end, a cherry branch placed by a child in front of an enormous factory. 'All this is meant to elicit emotion rather than give information,' Serban explained.¹⁷ The visual images were irreproachable and initiated a spate of imitative 'white-on-white' productions, but meaning was lost in farcical business and abrupt mood changes. Serban's later work included a Seagull in Japan (1980), centred around a magical lake; a more pedestrian Seagull in New York (1981); a Three Sisters (American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, Mass 1983) that made a concerted effort to present the characters as a kindergarten of obnoxious brats; and an Uncle Vanya (La Mama, New York, 1983, with Joseph Chaikin as Vanya), notable for a cavernous set that kept the characters in isolation from one another. The consensus is that Serban, in exorcising the demon of Stanislavsky, has provided stunning imagery and provocative moments but not well-acted, coherent and cohesive readings.

Peter Brook, possibly the most prestigious director on the world scene, had in his influential book The Empty Space (1969) foresworn the notion that Chekhov created slices of life; rather, Brook said, he removed and cultured the mille-feuille layers of life 'in an exquisitely cunning, completely artificial and meaningless order in which part of the cunning lay in so disguising the artifice that the result looked like the keyhole view it had never been'. More than just an illusion of life, they are a 'series of alienations: each rupture is a provocation and a call to thought.'¹⁸

Over a decade later, Brook embarked on his first Chekhov production, The Cherry Orchard (Bouffes du Nord, Paris, 1981) as 'a theatrical movement purely played . . . From the start I wanted to avoid sentimentality, a false Chekhovian manner that is not in the text'. Played in French with an international cast, the accessories stripped to a carpet, a few cushions and some straight-backed chairs to prevent the essentials from being lost in a welter of set-pieces, The Cherry Orchard became a poem about 'life and death and transition and change.' 'While playing the specifics,' Brook states, 'we also try to play the myth - the secret play.'¹⁹ Stanislavsky would have taken the 'secret play' to be the perezhivaniya, inner emotional experiences, ticking away in the pauses; Brook revealed a timelessness in the situation, and, along the way, ensemble comedy that did not need recourse to slapstick.

Like any densely textured dramatic work, Chekhov's plays in production require both the unifying vision that comes from a director and a company of strong actors, melded together as a nuanced, quasi-musical entity. Real­ism alone has proven to be insufficient to convey what George Calderon, as far back as 1912, called the 'cen­trifugal' nature of Chekhov's dramas, which

seek, not so much to draw our minds inwards to the consideration of the events they represent, as to cast them outwards to the larger process of the world which these events illuminate;. . . the sentiments to be aroused by the doings and sufferings of the personages of his

stage are not so much hope and fear for their individual fortunes as pity and amusement at the importance they set on them, and consolation for their particular tragedies in the spectacle of the general comedy of Life in which they are all merged . . .^M

References

1. A Life