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Chekhov and Stanislavsky
The relationship between Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theatre, co-founded
by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Chekhov’s old friend Vladimar
Nemirovich-Danchenko was to prove hugely significant for both parties. For the
author, it regenerated his interest in theatre and his role in it.
For the theater, not only did the success of their revival of The
Seagull save them from ruin but also Stanislavsky believed that Chekhov’s
work symbolized his ambitions towards naturalism in the theatre.
As the famous Russian actor-director Meyerhold points out, this was not
Chekhov’s sole purpose.
“Chekhov had come to visit a rehearsal of The
Seagull (September 11, 1989) in the Moscow Art Theatre.
One of the actors told him that during the play frogs croaked backstage,
dragonflies hummed and dogs howled.
‘What for?’ asked Anton .
[Chekhov] sounding dissatisfied.
‘It’s realistic,’ said the actor.
‘Realistic,’
A.P. [Chekhov] repeated with a laugh.
And then after a brief pause, he remarked, ‘The stage is art.
In one of Kramskoy’s genre paintings he has some magnificently drawn
faces. What if we cut out the
painted noses from one of these faces and substituted a live one?
The new nose would be real but the painting would be ruined.’”
Uncle Vanya
It is unclear exactly when Uncle
Vanya was written but it owes a debt of gratitude to The
Wood Demon. This earlier work
used the same settings and similar characters and some of its dialogue Chekhov
imported into Uncle Vanya. Yet The Wood Demon
is completely unambiguous: in Act 3
the Uncle Vanya character commits suicide and at the end of the play Sonya’s
love for the Dr. Astrov character is requited.
Uncle Vanya was first published
in a collection of his plays in 1897 and it is likely that it was written after The
Seagull some time in 1896. The
Moscow Art Theatre was eager to premiere the piece but Chekhov had promised it
long ago to the Maly Theatre, Chekhov
was keen to pacify the situation not wanting one theatre to lose out to another
but saw no amicable resolution. The
play’s fate was decided instead by the Theatrical and Literary Committee of
the Emperor’s Court who controlled the programming of the Imperial Theatres,
of which the Maly was one. They
read the play, interviewed Chekhov and requested extensive revisions to the
text.
With an easy conscience, Chekhov was now able to refuse changing the play
and pass it to the Moscow Art Theatre. To
placate the Maly, he offered to write a play especially for them but he failed
to deliver on this promise.
“You must not think that when we met after the success of The
Seagull there was anything affecting about the encounter.
He shook my hand more firmly than usual, smiled pleasantly, and that was
all. Chekhov was not in favor of expansive expression, whereas I felt a strong
urge towards it since I had become his ardent admirer.”
Konstantin Stanislavsky, Co-founder of The Moscow Art Theater
“The
secret of Chekhovian mood is hidden in the rhythm of the language, and the
actors of the Art Theatre heard just this rhythm during the days when they
rehearsed the first Chekhov production. They
heard it through their affection for the author . . .”
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Actor/Director
“It
seems to me that with Anton Pavlovich, everybody unwittingly felt an inner
longing to be simpler, more truthful, to be more himself.
More than once I saw how people cast off their motley attire of bookish
phrases and fashionable expressions . . .” Maxim Gorky, Author
 Desmond MacCarthy on Chekhov
. . . Chekhov is the dramatist of goodbyes; goodbyes to hopes and
ambitions, goodbyes between lovers.
Yet out of this concept of life, which might be thought ‘depressing,’
Chekhov makes a work of art which moves us and exalts us like a beautiful piece
of music. It is not in a mood of
depression one leaves the theatre after seeing Three
Sisters. How true it is that a good play should be like a piece of
music! For our reason it must have
the logical coherence of fact, but for our emotions the sinuous unanalysable
appeal of music. In and out, in and
out, the theme of hope for the race and the theme of personal despair are
interwoven one with the other. Each
character is like a different instrument which leads and gives way alternately,
sometimes playing alone, sometimes with others, the theme of the miseries of
cultivated exiles, or the deeper one of the longing of youth; the dreamy, once
gay Irina, the sober and steady Olga, the passionate Marsha, half ashamed of her
greedy clutch on happiness, vulgarizing herself, she knows, but not caring for
that. And what queer harsh notes
proceed from the black pit of egotistic megalomania and ferocious diffidence,
Solioni! Solioni thought himself a
romantic Lemontov; nowadays he would pride himself on being a ruthless superman
of the underworld. Plus ça change, plus c’est la méme chose . . .
(1967)
Producer’s Note Laurence
Olivier
Quite late in rehearsal I found something I had scrawled on the flyleaf
of my script one night during the pre-rehearsal preparation time.
As you will surmise, it was late at night:
‘In
Chekhov we are all stars:
but
not selfish, glistening on our own.
We
are flocks of bright angels,
all
glorifying our sun—Chekhov"
It was perhaps after all a little too
late at night. At all events this
splendid sentiment somehow never got itself recited to the company.
It is only worth recording as an instance of the sort of slavish
discipleship that this master evokes in his interpretative craftsmen.
Once you are brought to the faith, his godhead is pretty well beyond
resistance or criticism and his grip on the heart is as hoops of steel. Though
no plays of his can be said to be easy to produce, his intentions, rhythms and
scoring are clear to the susceptible initiate.
Once his intentions are perceived, he is subject to (and indeed he would
seem to delight in) a wide variety of interpretations, always excepting the
ponderous. We remember how he
insists that all his works be regarded as comedies—Uncle
Vanya he himself describes as ‘a farce.’
One may detect a slight note of self-deprecation in this, but one must
take the hint boldly enough to ensure that what is serious must filter through a
delicate lens composed of a tender awareness of human frailties and the
absurdities.
To the wise gods our most tragic contortions can only be pathetic, if not
laughable, and to Chekhov the least desirable of human attitudes is the Earnest.
Stringberg had a remarkable appreciation of the Tragedy-Comedy equation;
Chekhov’s understanding of it was more refined.
I am given to believe that for him the ultra-realism of the Stanislavski
approach was not refined enough. Once,
when he was discussing some of the naturalistic touches Stanislavski had
introduced into The Seagull, he said: ‘Realistic?
But the stage is art. Kramskoy has a picture on which the faces are
painted beautifully. What would
happen if one cut out the nose of one of the faces and substituted a real one
for it? The nose would be realistic, but the picture would be
ruined.’
The Life of Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov was born on January 17th, 1860 in Taganrog, a
Russian port 600 miles south of Moscow. His
father, Paul, was a grocer, and ardent church-goer and a strict disciplinarian,
beating his children on a daily basis. At
sixteen Chekhov found himself alone in Taganrog after his bankrupt father fled
to Moscow, soon followed by the rest of the family.
Chekhov had to stay to finish his education.
He spent the next three years impoverished but free of his father’s
influence, later rejoining his family in Moscow where he was to study medicine. To contribute to his family’s income, Chekhov started to
write comic sketches for journals. Soon
he had a cult following, was promoted in 1882 to Oskolki (“Fragments”),
a prominent comic magazine, and then to a daily newspaper, The St.  Petersburg Gazette.
In 1884 he graduated as a doctor and was to practice erratically until
1899. The turning point in his
career came when he started to write short stories for Novoye
vremya (“New Time”), St. Petersburg’s largest daily newspaper, and
owned by the millionaire publisher Alexis Suvorin, a vital advocate of
Chekhov’s work.
He now became a national literary figure.
Ivanov (1887) was his first play to be produced but had a mixed
reception. Subsequently, The
Wood Demon (1889), from the embers of which emerged Uncle
Vanya and The Seagull (1895) were
produced with the same indifferent response from the press and public.
It was not until the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 began producing his work
with a revival of The Seagull that Chekhov felt that his plays were at least being
approached from the right direction. Uncle
Vanya (1896), The Three Sisters (1900) and The
Cherry Orchard (1903) were all premiered by the Moscow Art Theatre.
Throughout his life, Chekhov was plagued by ill health and in 1904 he
succumbed to tuberculosis.
Derek Jacobi defends the current Broadway
mounting of Uncle Vanya, saying to those who don’t like it, “Sorry. The
production is what it is. I think it’s true to Chekhov, who called his plays
comedies. I think those who came unprepared to be served a great deal of
laughter as well as, hopefully, a great deal of tears, took the attitude that
we were patronizing them and trying to make the play accessible by making it a
bit funnier than normal. Not at all.” Jacobi paused for effect and repeated,
“Not at all. I think we play truly. I think the translation is a very true
translation. It is an eminently sayable translation. To me, it doesn’t sound
like a translation. For those who didn’t respond to it, what can you say?
There were some that did and some that didn’t. You can’t please all of them
all the time. It’s better to be controversial than everybody loving you or
everybody hating you."
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