ENCYCLOPEDIA of THEATRE and PERFORMANCE Anton Chekhov

Home , Boys (short story), Moscow Art Theatre, Platonov (play), Theatre director, The Bear (play), Uncle Vanya

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Anton Chekhov Rhonda Blair Southern Methodist University

INTRODUCTION

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright and short story writer who revolutionised approaches to both forms and has been a major influence on European theatre. His plays are produced more frequently than those of any other playwright, except for William Shakespeare. Works of subtlety, energy and theatricality, his plays capture the complexity and richness of human experience. The major plays – The Seagull: A comedy in four acts (1896, performed 1898 at Moscow Art Theatre), Uncle Vanya: Scenes from country life (1899), The Three Sisters: A drama in four acts (1900), and The Cherry Orchard: A comedy in four acts (1904) – helped launch the Moscow Art Theatre and assure its place in history. It is possible to argue that Chekhov gave us modern tragicomedy.

HISTORY

Born in Taganrog in southern Russia, Chekhov was the grandson of a serf who purchased his freedom. His father Pavel, a grocery store owner, was harsh and sometimes abusive to Chekhov and his siblings, even flogging the older boys (he had one sister, and another died in infancy). Chekhov received a rigorous primary and secondary education in Taganrog schools from 1867 to 1879. While there, he edited a student paper and wrote plays (now lost), as well as a comic journal, The Stutterer. He frequented the Taganrog theatre, whose repertory included Shakespeare, Molière and 19th-century Russian playwrights. Chekhov’s ironic, humorous and clear- eyed view of human behaviour was evident from the beginning. It was also during this time that he developed the first symptoms of tuberculosis, a disease that would eventually cause his death.

Joining his family in Moscow in 1879, Chekhov entered medical school on scholarship and wrote short pieces for humorous magazines as a way to make money to support himself and his family. For the next seven years he published in journals in Moscow and St. Petersburg, sometimes under the comic name Antosha Chekhonte. His first full-length play, Platonov (1881), was turned down by the Maly Theatre and was not published until 1923; rarely produced, it has had important adaptations and productions in the latter part of the 20th century.

After graduating from medical school in 1884, Chekhov started practicing as a doctor. His first short story collection, Fairy Tales of Melpomene was also published around this time. By the late 1880s Chekhov was well established as a prose writer. His full-length play, Ivanov, produced in 1887 at Korsh’s Theatre, had a mixed response, though productions in 1888 of his early comic one-act plays, The Bear and The Proposal, were hugely successful. A revised version of Ivanov was successfully premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in 1889, though in the same year a production of the full-length Wood Demon at the Abramova Theatre was panned by critics. Chekhov soon revised the latter as Uncle Vanya, though this was not published until 1897, or staged until 1899.

Chekhov was, until his health prevented it, regularly engaged in what might be called humanitarian projects. In 1890 he travelled to Sakhalin Island to do census and medical work in the prison camp there, and he then sailed in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. He also began regularly travelling to the

West, making his first trip to Paris and Italy in 1891. The same year he bought a small farm in Melikhovo, about 40 miles south of Moscow, settling there the following year, just as severe drought and a cholera epidemic hit. Chekhov immediately responded, heading up a district commission and treating the poor for free; he also supported the building of schools for nearby villages. This pattern of service continued. His relationship with Lika Mizinova in 1893 may have been part of the inspiration for Nina in The Seagull. As his health continued to worsen, Chekhov took his second trips to Italy and Paris in 1894. 1895 was a significant year, with the publication of two seminal works: Sakhalin Island – an exposé of what he saw in the prison camp there – and The Seagull.

In 1896, The Seagull opened at the Alexandrinsky Theatre with a benefit performance for a favourite comic actress. It was a failure, in no small part because the audience came expecting to see a typical comedy, and the play was subtitled “A comedy in four acts.” Even though the play went on to have a successful run and success in other cities, Chekhov at the time said he would never write for theatre again. Meanwhile, his health continued to worsen, and in 1897 he was hospitalised, staying in Paris from autumn through late spring for treatment. After his return, his health did not improve. He suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage and so moved to Yalta in search of a more congenial climate. During this time a fateful encounter occurred: Vladimir Nemirovich Danchenko, along with Konstantin Stanislavsky co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), persuaded Chekhov to allow MAT to produce The Seagull.

In late 1898, with the second play in its inaugural season, MAT produced The Seagull to great acclaim. The relationship forged between theatre and playwright would be a lynchpin in profoundly changing acting and playwriting in 20th-century western theatre. In 1899, MAT produced Uncle Vanya (following its presentation at theatres in Kharkov and Kiev). As his health deteriorated, Chekhov sold the Melikhovo estate and built a home in Yalta. In 1900, he received a major honour: membership in the literary division of the Academy of Sciences. MAT toured its productions of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya to Sevastopol, where Chekhov could attend. That autumn, Chekhov travelled to Nice, where he finished writing Three Sisters, a play that MAT produced in early 1901. In May, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, the company’s leading actress, who had played Arkadina in The Seagull, Yelena in Uncle Vanya, and Masha in Three Sisters. She would also play Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard.

As Tsar Nicholas II increasingly tried to suppress growing popular unrest, Chekhov felt the pressure in at least two ways. In 1902, he resigned from the Academy of Sciences when the Tsar refused to allow the election of Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) to stand; Gorky, a compatriot of Chekhov, was a major naturalist/realist author and playwright who wrote sympathetically and boldly about the plight of the underclass. In 1903 the censor – always an active presence in Russian (and Soviet) arts and culture – banned Chekhov’s plays from being performed in lower priced theatres geared toward the working classes. Throughout this politically and personally difficult year, Chekhov continued to write. The prolific nature of his writing is evident in the 11-volume set of his collected works, published in 1902, followed by the 16-volume second edition a year later. He completed writing his final play, The Cherry Orchard, in September, and MAT began rehearsals. The premiere in January 1904 was a great success, but Chekhov’s health went into a steep decline in the spring. He and Knipper travelled to Germany in June hoping to find some relief. With Knipper by his side, Chekhov died, aged 44, in Badenweiler.

METHODS

Over the course of his life, Chekhov wrote nine short plays and six full- length ones. The four major plays are the key to a basic understanding of Chekhov’s dramaturgy.

The plays are set in isolated provincial Russia; three – The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard – are rural and centre on the landowning class, while Three Sisters is set in a large town far from Moscow and focuses on a military officer’s family. They have in common the characters’ struggles in love, work (including art), and finding meaning in life, or, as Richard Gilman puts it, existence “poised between fact and desire” (Gilman, 1995, p.xvi). The action foregrounds relationships and characters’ responses to their situations. Chekhov depicts his flawed, conflicted characters with insight and empathy, much like a good doctor diagnosing a patient. They are neither heroes or villains; rather, multi-dimensional, often contradictory, characters responding to the flow of circumstances around them, much of which is beyond their control. More obviously dramatic or theatrical events, such as shootings, auctions, the death of a baby, and fires, typically occur offstage; what matters is not spectacle and suspense in the traditional sense, but how characters deal with the events of their lives. This complexity and the seeming absence of onstage ‘big events’ or ‘drama’ have led some mistakenly to describe Chekhov’s plays as dramas of inaction or dramas of “indirect action.” This is a profound misreading: the plays are full of unfolding action composed of large and small events and decisions. The plays encompass both the Russian shirokaia dusha – a Russian trope for expansive soul and abundant emotionality – and Chekhov’s dispassionate, ironic, and compassionate view of the messy over-spillings of the heart.

Chekhov’s modernist, even existentialist, view is embodied in a revolutionary dramaturgy that eschews established rules governing plot construction, such as those of the well-made play that Henrik Ibsen used to radical ends. The characters’ dynamic complexity is mirrored in the complexity of the plays’ structure, which has sometimes been called polyphonic, akin to complex, layered pieces of music – a multiplicity of voices interweaving, rising, and falling to create the texture of life. This polyphony is reinforced by the absence of a central character in any of the plays; rather, groups of characters carry the core action. Much like every instrument in a tightly constructed piece of chamber music, Treplev, Nina,

Arkadina, and Trigorin in The Seagull, and Vanya, Sonya, Astrov, and Yelena in Uncle Vanya are all equally essential. In general, it is more apt to think in terms of complexity and contradiction in character impulses, characters responding vitally to their situations, rather than in terms of ‘subtext’ or ‘motive.’

The action of all four major plays is launched by the arrival of characters who disrupt the order of the play’s world, and closes with departures (Arkadina and Trigorin in The Seagull, Yelena and Serebryakov in Uncle Vanya, military troops in Three Sisters, and Ranevskaya’s arrival and then many characters’ departures in The Cherry Orchard). Each act in a play can often be defined by a major event, for example, in Three Sisters, Act I is a name day party (the equivalent of a birthday) and the anniversary of the family patriarch’s death; Act II is carnival night (the equivalent of Mardi Gras); Act III is in the middle of the night, the family dealing with a big fire in town; and Act IV is the day of the troops’ departure and Tusenbach’s duel. Chekhov’s settings for each act provide not just ‘representational’ locations, but cues as to the nature and mood of the action. In The Seagull, Act I is a moonlit night by a lake on the property, Act II is on a hot midday on the croquet lawn by the house, Act III is in the dining room at lunchtime, and Act IV is in Treplev’s study on a windy autumn night; among other things, there is a move from open, natural space to one character’s enclosed room.

What might seem random or cryptic in the texts is always part of the fabric of relationships and events, and can always be connected to the concrete given circumstances of the play overall and of the moment (to use a term from Stanislavsky). Three examples from The Cherry Orchard: In Act I, Charlotta Ivanovna’s “My dog eats nuts, too,” dropped in seemingly from out of nowhere, is not random: it is the introduction of her pet to Pishchik as part of the bustle of the group’s arrival from the train station. In another instance, Chekhov uses ‘indirect’ language – people not talking about what they are in fact talking about – as a way of capturing the intensity of the situation, as in the scene between Lopakhin and Varya in Act IV, in which he plans to, but cannot propose to her (to please Ranevskaya), and the pressing, even urgent, subject of marriage is not mentioned, but is silently, thickly in the air. Also, twice the audience hears the mysterious, distant sound as though of a breaking string in Acts II and IV, sometimes regarded as an aural metaphor for the dying of old Russia. And, both times this occurs, Epikhodov, known as “twenty-two misfortunes” because of his

6 frequent mishaps and clumsiness, is in the vicinity with his guitar. The sound is a ‘both/and’ – an aural symbol of cultural entropy and a comic, even farcical, intervention into the plot’s subdued moments. There is always a material ‘explanation’ that also supports the overarching mood and feeling.

Ambiguity, interconnection, the passage of time and the fact that things in life are often not resolved are key. Chekhov saw human beings acutely and almost always without judgement. This latter is vital to Chekhov’s perspective that embraced complexities of human behaviour and desire, the inevitability of change and loss, and the view that life is often, simultaneously, both really, really sad and really, really funny.

Chekhov’s influence can be seen in modernists who followed. Among playwrights, perhaps most notable is Samuel Beckett, whose tragicomedies humanely and humorously explore futility, hope, inevitability and persistence; the theatrical trappings may differ, but the vision of the human condition springs from a similar ironic, clear-eyed place. Lines from Waiting for Godot could serve as well for Chekhov: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on…Yes, let’s go. (They do not move).” Another example is Harold Pinter whose plays contain ambiguity and complexity of character and motive, much like Chekhov (Pinter’s The Homecoming has been described as a dark kind of Cherry Orchard), and use rhythm and seeming indirection to create layered, fluid characters and relationships.

Significant stage productions and films of the plays in the last half-century include: The Seagull - TV film by director John J. Desmond, 1975; New York Shakespeare Festival, director Mike Nichols 2001; Royal Court Theatre, 2007, and Broadway, 2008, director Ian Rickson. Uncle Vanya - director Mike Nichols, Broadway, 1973; State Theater of Lithuania, international tour, director Eimuntas Nekrosius, 1991; film, Vanya on 42nd Street, director Louis Malle, 1994. Three Sisters – film based on Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio production, director Paul Bogart, 1966; film, directors Laurence Olivier and Paul Sichel, 1970; Off-Broadway, director Austin Pendleton, 2011. The Cherry Orchard – audio production, LA Theatre Works, director Rosalyn Ayres, 2001; Steppenwolf Theatre, director Tina Landau, 2004; The Young Vic, director Katie Mitchell, 2014. Laurence Senelick’s The Chekhov Theatre (1997) contains a definitive list of productions done before 1995.

Script adaptations include: Joshua Logan’s The Wisteria Trees, an adaptation of The Cherry Orchard to the US south, 1950; Tennessee Williams’ The Notebook of Trigorin, a feverish adaptation of The Seagull, 1980; Michael Frayn’s Wild Honey, an adaptation of Platonov, 1984; Dreamthinkspeak’s Before I Sleep, adapted from The Cherry Orchard, 2010; and Annie Baker’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya, 2012.