Chekhov as Barometer

...And while the farcical was overdone, the serious passages were often too self-consciously lyrical and sing-song...

...The farcical element was more pronounced in the New York productions of Chekhov than in any others I have seen, to the point where Chekhov himself would surely have been exasperated...

...Practical considerations also have played a part, of course...

...I began to feel that if, for instance, Yepikhodov were to bump into the wall yet again or to drop still another box, I should find myself screaming...

...I have honed my assassin's axe in vain...

...If one wanted to see an old man spend five minutes tacking across the stage to an orchestration of titters from the audience, the Art Theater could deliver that sort of thing better than any other theater in the world...

...Could it be that the Moscow Art Theater actors, of all people, were adlibbing...

...Having seen many previous Moscow Art Theater renderings of Chekhov and other dramatists in London and Moscow, I had come to think of this company as a sort of touring mausoleum displaying the corpse of Chekhov as carefully embalmed as that of Lenin—and as equally likely to be a wax substitute...

...Indeed, on the whole my views corresponded with those expressed in these pages by Andrew Field ("Visitors from the Past...

...Chekhov, we were given to understand, foresaw the coming Bolshevik Revolution back in the '90s, when he was already interpreting it along the lines of Komsomolskaya Pravda in the '60s...

...In Three Sisters, too, bits of rejected material had been inserted in the production...

...It has apparently come out of its embalmed trance and is flexing its nearly atrophied muscles...

...The most embarrassing episode was the prolonged game of hide-and-seek, which seemed likely to continue far into the night, played by Vatya, Trofimov and Anya at the end of Act II of The Cherry Orchard...

...It also happens that I know almost by heart the texts of the two Chekhov plays performed during the Art Theater's visit— Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard— since I recently brought out a translation and edition of them in English...

...Soviet plays of the excessively "improving" type were being frozen out of the theater even in Stalin's day...

...The appearance of the Mummers, incidentally, was just the sort of thing that Stanislavsky was always proposing, much to Chekhov's disgust, for Stanislavsky obviously thought of Chekhov's text as a vacuum which somehow had to be filled with all manner of flummery...

...It seems reasonable to do so because it has so often performed that role in the past...

...The process of looking for signs of "liberalization" or greater freedom in Soviet life is a tedious one, because the view is all signposts and no freedom...

...Thus, when Trofimov staggered round the stage looking for his galoshes, the audience could see what was happening and enjoy it all the more because it was such a relief from straining their ears to catch the semi-audible tones of what for most was an unfamiliar foreign language...

...I do not know exactly when the Art Theater shook off this propagandist rubbish...

...Instead, the productions were surprisingly improved, and the reaction—at least on the part of some New York critics—was not the unthinking enthusiasm which too often greets the Art Theater abroad...

...Scribbling frantically in the darkness, I recorded several variations from the Chekhov texts...

...It is pleasant to think that the trend might be maintained...

...And in the case of Chekhov there is good authority for it too: Chekhov was continually badgering Stanislavsky and Nemirovich- Danchenko to treat his plays as comedies, even as farces...

...The gullible Anglo- Saxon may be willing to swallow all that tedium because it is so strange and exotic, but the sophisticated Muscovite will not accept it...

...The gestures were beautifully and elaborately executed...

...The productions placed fantastic emphasis on the element of slapstick and character acting...

...So far as Gogol's Dead Souls was concerned, this caricaturist approach came off...

...Yet the productions were surprisingly enjoyable and moving...

...The present productions may have been only half alive, but that is a lot better than being wholly dead...

...In the City Center Theater, acoustically not ideal and abuzz with chit-chat and the squeaking of transistors giving the English translation on all sides, I was thus in a better position than most to follow closely the rather curious proceedings taking place on stage...

...NL, February 1...

...They were then sent away by the nurse with the words "The little boy is ill...

...Thus the new Chekhovs are a culturally hopeful phenomenon, insofar as it is possible to take the Art Theater as a barometer of Soviet conditions...

...It may even have shed a few additional scales especially for New York...

...The Art Theater has found itself compelled to change its ways in order to sell its seats...

...New York and the Moscow Art Theater, and not least Chekhov himself, came out unexpectedly well in the recent visit...

...However, when one of Chekhov's characters tells the audience that "life in 50 years' time will be marvelous," Chekhov was clearly not providing a justification of the Russian Revolution avant la lettre—still less endorsing the state of affairs in mid-20th-century Moscow Yet the Art Theater always tried hard to make it seem so...

...As for the tramp in Act II of The Cherry Orchard singing the Toreador Song from Carmen and the comical French put into Yasha's mouth in Act III, the less said the better...

...But the most astonishing thing was that Chekhov's texts had been tampered with in many places— mainly with the idea of making the productions more farcical and extravagant...

...Chekhov would not have liked those Mummers, nor the over-loud noise of the fire engines in Act III of Three Sisters, and many other weird sound effects, so strange that the occasional noise of (real) New York fire engines outside the theater at first seemed to be part of some new extravagant sound interpretation by an over-experimental producer...

...I am referring to the spectacle of bloodless, de-Chekhovized Art Theater presentations of Chekhov, long despised as excruciatingly vulgar by self-respecting Moscow intellectuals, being received in the West with genuflexions and squeals of uncomprehending sycophantic ecstasy...

...It was hard, though, to share the general approval for something so extravagantly overdone...

...They were not what I had expected...

...Even the simplest and most ordinary dialogue had to be intoned in a peculiar, unreal, sing-song voice, such as no normal Russian has ever used in actual speech...

...I went as a potential assassin, and as a sniffer of the Soviet atmosphere, of which the Art Theater happens to provide a sort of barometer...

...The New York audience obviously liked it, and for a very natural reason: Except for those in the front orchestra seats, hardly anyone could really hear the words...

...In New York, for example, Trofimov was treated as a purely comic character—a great improvement on the Komsomol activist, though perhaps the pendulum has been allowed to swing too far in the other direction...

...For the Art Theater, it seemed to me, had made a painstaking study of Chekhov's many objections to Stanislavsky's productions of his plays, and had then gone on to outdo even Stanislavsky in flouting Chekhov's own wishes...

...And then there were those politically nauseous passages: for example, where Trofimov and Anya in The Cherry Orchard were presented in the disguise of Komsomol Activists or eager beavers, spokesmen of a progressive younger generation, orating with blazing eyes and fervid gestures about the coming "new life" in Russia...

...In The Cherry Orchard, the comical Charlotta was made to do conjuring tricks not provided for in Chekhov's stage directions and was even brought on stage to do a bit of dialogue not contained in the received text of the play (though it does occur in a rejected draft version...

...What seems most important of all is that the Art Theater is at least on the move...

...Now, obviously, Soviet theatergoers have been voting with their feet against the Art Theater too...

...Much of this inserted material was purely intrusive, not being found in any of Chekhov's drafts...

...Of course, this does mean saying goodbye to a delicious paradox which has delighted the more cynical part of my nature for some time...

...The fact is that, at home in Moscow, the Art Theater's seats have been increasingly hard to fill, especially now that it has to compete with such live theaters as the Moscow Contemporary...

...There is, after all, a limit to the number of collective farmers from the nearby countryside who can be dragooned into goggling at the old marmoreal friezes night after night...

...An example was the actual appearance in the doorway of the Mummers or Carnival Party in Act II of Three Sisters...

...Still, if things are moving even in the Art Theater, that surely is meaningful and perhaps indicates a trend away from the Soviet tendency to treat all cultural phenomena as part of a lifeless cult...

...But changes have been made, and they are more than welcome...

...In any event, the new flexibility of the Art Theater has given enormous pleasure and encouragement to one who both cares about the plays of Chekhov and worries about Soviet Russia...

...In Stalin's day it was, in fact, little more than a barometer—an instrument for imposing uniform techniques and conformism on the Russian theater as a whole...

...He would have found his real metier, it was suggested, as the organizer of Communist Youth Festivals...

...Was there ever such an orgy of doddering, mumbling, stumbling, and head-scratching, of artistically contrived aimless drifting about, clearly rehearsed down to the number of millimeters by which, at a precise instant, a given eyebrow might be raised, an ear cocked...