Ralph Lindheim is another of those editors with whom I became close friends even though I never met him. He asked me to write several essays for him at various times and I was always very grateful for that. He threw me wonderful topics that gave me opportunities to stretch out in ways I never would have had, had he not reached out to me. In this case Ralph was guest editing an issue of Modern Drama that was dedicated to the work of Anton Chekhov. What occurred as a result is an oversized, not to say enormous, piece that covered just about every more or less current Russian production of a Chekhov play or story. It was the perfect time for something like this, since in 1999 Chekhov was the runaway leader on Russia’s stages. Remember: this is still before the notion of “new drama” kicked in – that would only come about in another two or three years. At this point Chekhov was still the most beloved of “contemporary” writers. This piece originally had 22 footnotes, but they all seem to have fallen off my Word document at some point over the years. I supply the notes in photo form at the end of the piece. It should be clear what note refers to what phrase in the body of the text. It’s mostly bibliographical information.
Center Stage: Chekhov in Russia 100 Years On
By John Freedman
Published in Modern Drama
Vol. XLII, Number 4
Winter 1999
Pp. 541-564
I. THE PRESENCE
Anton Chekhov was not the sole classic author to hold Russian theaters captive for much of the 1990s. At the beginning of 1999, a careful, though inexact, count of Moscow shows based on works by Chekhov, Alexander Ostrovsky, Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky revealed some interesting numbers. The leader, Ostrovsky, who wrote or co-wrote over fifty plays, had thirty-five productions of his plays running at various houses throughout the capital. Right behind him, with thirty productions of plays or dramatized stories, was Chekhov. (If we include the ten one-act plays and count separately the early works that later evolved into others, Chekhov generously can be considered the author of eighteen dramatic works.) Gogol’s plays and prose works formed the basis for fifteen productions and Dostoevsky’s novels and stories had been adapted for twelve stage productions.
But whatever the numbers, it was Chekhov who was in control.
What might even be called Chekhov’s hegemony could be discerned in a vast number of ways that often had nothing to do with productions of his plays. He was simultaneously a model and an opponent for many contemporary writers. His name (as a talisman) or his image (as an icon) cropped up frequently. Often the references were burlesques.
In Grigory Gurvich’s song-and-dance show, I Tap About Moscow (1992), at Moscow’s Bat Cabaret Theater, amidst jabs at various cultural figures and institutions including Vladimir Lenin, Marilyn Monroe, Catherine the Great and the KGB, a character cracked a joke about Chekhov dying of tuberculosis. In Vladimir Mirzoev’s production of Alexei Kazantsev’s That, This Other World (1997) at Moscow’s Stanislavsky Theater, a character muttered and beat his chest as he coughed “…like that, uh…, like that… Chekhov.” It was done so that most everyone in the hall knew perfectly well what famous sufferer of tuberculosis coughed “like that” before the name was pronounced.
These two examples are minor, indeed, which is precisely why I commence with them. Chekhov was omnipresent in Moscow in the 1990s, down to the smallest, most insignificant detail.
Chekhov’s name became both a symbol intended to imply excellence as well as a brand label that could be expected to attract attention and perhaps sponsors’ money. When the Moscow Art Theater, for many years honoring the name of Maxim Gorky in its title, split into two warring factions in 1987, the theater’s artistic director Oleg Yefremov quickly moved to ally his half of the troupe with its founding playwright. His crew, the one remaining in the original building on Kamergersky Lane, became known as the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater. When in 1990 Leonid Trushkin founded the first independent theater of the perestroika era, he called it the Anton Chekhov Theater and opened with a production of The Cherry Orchard. When the International Confederation of Theater Associations inagurated a massive festival in 1992, they called it the Anton Chekhov International Theater Festival.
Peter Stein, the renowned German director, saw his reputation in Russia take a steep climb thanks to his productions of Three Sisters, which toured Moscow in 1990, and of The Cherry Orchard, which played in Moscow in 1992. The depth and intricacy of these shows caused some to speak in jest and many more in seriousness of Stein as more Russian than most Russian directors and as the last bastion of genuine Stanislavskian realism on the modern stage. Consequently, Stein was awarded a Russian Theater Foundation prize in 1993 in recognition of “outstanding works aiding the unification of the Russian cultural space.” In 1996 Stein spent several weeks in Russia with a troupe of Italian actors rehearsing his production of Uncle Vanya for the Teatro di Roma and the Teatro Stabile di Parma. The show celebrated its world premiere in Moscow as an entry in the Second Anton Chekhov International Theater Festival. True, by this time the meticulous Stein approach was beginning to look repetitive to some, but there is no denying that the Chekhov-Stein connection had become a prominent landmark on the Russian theater scene in the first half of the ’90s.
Perhaps the most telling non-theatrical incident involving the Chekhov legacy was an informal series of lectures organized by the playwright Yelena Gremina in 1996 at the Chekhov museum in Melikhovo. The occasion was the one-hundredth anniversary of the legendary failure of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The point was to use the date as a springboard for protest against those who were so loudly proclaiming the “death” of contemporary playwriting. Gremina, a writer with a refined sense of humor, indicated that the seminar was intended to buoy the spirits of her much-suffering, seldom-produced colleagues. For all those playwrights who were unable to get their plays produced because so many theaters were busy reviving Chekhov, it was an opportunity to gloat over one of Chekhov’s most humiliating failures. On the other hand, the original flop of The Seagull was grounds for hope on the part of every neglected contemporary writer — if so many once thought that Chekhov was such a bad playwright, that might well mean that the stinging criticism aimed at playwrights in the 1990s was equally mistaken.
If many would have liked to shake free of Chekhov’s almost strangling influence on the theatrical process, Iosif Raikhelgauz at the Contemporary Play School felt the need to reclaim Chekhov from the grips of the Moscow Art Theater style of acting — what Nikolai Erdman called with friendly derision, “drinking tea, sweating and blotting oneself with a handkerchief.” In two different Chekhov productions — a show called What’re You Doing in a Tux? based on The Proposal (1992), and The Seagull (1998) — Raikhelgauz took obvious potshots at the Art Theater by way of its famous seagull logo. In the earlier show, a makeshift cardboard imitation of the Art Theater seagull dangled precariously above the action until the finale when one of the actors aimed a harquebus at it and shot it down. In the latter show, the secondary character of Yakov repeatedly ran around pushing before him a comical toy, a wing-flapping seagull on wheels at the end of a stick. After the performance ended, the audience filed out of the auditorium past a framed, stuffed effigy of a seagull.
Fragments of Chekhov’s drama surfaced in various productions of other works, such as Natalya Kolyakanova’s production of a Japanese play, Mountain Witch (1993), at the Stanislavsky Theater; Vitaly Lanskoi’s theatrical composition at the Stanislavsky about Sergei Yesenin, The Black Man (1995); and Yury Pogrebnichko’s production of Hamlet (1996) at what has since come to be known as Okolo, the Theater Near the Stanislavsky House.
Chekhov’s drama by the end of the 20th century, perhaps like Pushkin’s poetry before it, had come to be perceived as a cultural given, a voice that everyone not only could hear in the air, but would recognize upon hearing it.
Then there was the dialogue that contemporary writers conducted with Chekhov in their own plays. The respectful approach was taken by Yury Volkov (born 1951) in Anton, a biographical play about Chekhov’s relationships with several different women. (It was produced in 1994 by the All the World International Theater Center.) At the opposite end of the spectrum was The Sakhalin Wife (produced in 1996 at the Debut Center) by Yelena Gremina (born 1956). In this story about a group of Sakhalin Island convicts set in the year 1890, we are tipped off early that a certain Doctor Chekhov is expected to arrive soon on a fact-finding trip. But, while people mention the “prominent doctor” from time to time during the course of the play, Gremina never allows him to make an on-stage appearance. In fact, one senses that she gleefully ends the play just as Chekhov reportedly arrives and enters the neighboring room.
The influence of Chekhov’s drama could be felt substantially in the works of many contemporary authors. And while my main purpose in this article is to outline the way in which Chekhov’s plays were being performed on the Russian stage in the 1990s, I cannot fail to mention some of the contemporary plays that, in one way or another, entered into a dialogue with Chekhov.
Leonid Zorin’s A Moscow Nest (Mossoviet Theater, 1997) was a deliberate clone of a “typical” Chekhov play; a family from the intelligentsia, along with several of its friends who drop by their apartment from time to time, has lost its sense of belonging in the modern world. In an echo of Three Sisters, the central characters are three women — in this case a young step-mother and her two step-daughters — who miss the glory their family once enjoyed when the recently deceased patriarch was alive. Some of the names, such as Sonya and Masha, are obviously reminiscent of Chekhovian heroines.
In the nostalgic comedy, The Little Cherry Orchard (Akimov Theater of Comedy, St. Petersburg, 1997), Alexei Slapovsky went even further, if no deeper, in using Chekhov’s drama as a springboard. Here the setting is an urban rooftop where a single cherry tree, a symbol for the lost world of the past, still grows. Also up here a character named Uncle Vanya Votkin anonymously tends a flower garden. He is as old-fashioned, as ridiculed and as “worthless” as Firs in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Another echoing name is that of Ranyaeva, the eccentric, selfish mother of a ditzy bride-who-is-not-to-be. The little rooftop cherry “orchard” is intended by the main character Azalkanov to be the place where he will celebrate his wedding as perhaps the last event of his life that will take place in this old building of his youth: Now he has plans, rather like Lopakhin in Chekhov’s play, to tear the house down and build a five-star hotel in its stead.
The similarities with The Cherry Orchard in Slapovsky’s play are less parallels than echoes that ricochet through the mind. Many of the apparent analogies fall apart as the distinctly modern plot involving New Russian thugs unwinds. In any case, by the time the cherry tree is blown up by a hand grenade, we have already learned that Azalkanov is a patsy and the real power belongs to those who have no ties whatsoever to this “little cherry orchard.”
These plays by Zorin (born 1924) and Slapovsky (born 1957) are examples of works that take simple structural or thematic elements from Chekhov and build on them further. In the case of Zorin’s A Moscow Nest, the intention is to create a Chekhovian ambience and develop a modern story within that framework. It is, to an extent, an experiment in testing the viability at the end of the 20th century of what we have come to call Chekhovian drama. In The Little Cherry Orchard, the device is more blunt; Slapovsky tosses out signs in the way of names and situations that he knows his audience will respond to immediately. Where Zorin expects his audience to enter the Chekhovian atmosphere with him, Slapovsky seeks to make his audience compare and contrast. For example, we hear the word “cherry orchard” or the name “Ranyaeva” and react in one way because of our familiarity with Chekhov until the reality of Slapovsky’s play makes us reconsider. To a certain extent, Slapovsky set himself the goal of deconstructing — or, to avoid that word which has largely been discredited by theoretical fashion — dismantling Chekhov to indicate how far we are now removed from him.
I suspect that neither of these plays wholly accomplishes what it set out to do. I find A Moscow Nest a pale epigone of its influences while The Little Cherry Orchard remains overshadowed by the models it spars with. If we were to remove the latter play’s internal debate with Chekhov — the characters’ names and conditions that remind us of his works — we would be left with something inferior and incomplete. Be that as it may, Zorin and Slapovsky were both participants in a widespread movement whose goal was, in one way or another, to take stock of the state of Russian drama one-hundred years after Chekhov had sent it off on a new trajectory.
Probably the most important writer in this process was Olga Mukhina (born 1970). Her first two plays produced — Tanya-Tanya (Fomenko Studio, 1996) and YoU (Fomenko Studio, 1997) — in many ways combined the approaches that I noted in the plays of Zorin and Slapovsky. They evoke that lazy atmosphere of life among the aimless, dreamy Russian intellegentsia that Chekhov made canonical, while at the same time both find plenty of room for parody and polemics with Chekhovian drama.
In YoU, cherries fall from cherry trees, a character repeatedly serves tea as if that were a crucial human endeavour and another character comically echoes Irina’s call in Three Sisters of “To Moscow!” In a farcical scene faintly echoing Vanya’s attempt to shoot Professor Serebyakov in Uncle Vanya, two men try unsuccessfully to kill each other in a spat over a woman. In Tanya-Tanya, characters named Ivanov and Uncle Vanya have nothing to do with their namesakes. Mukhina’s Uncle Vanya, especially, is something of a red herring. He is a simple, good-hearted, much put-upon worker who defies our expectations of a character by this name every step of the way.
Perhaps most telling of the Chekhov echoes in Mukhina’s plays is the humming (Tanya-Tanya) and the ringing (YoU) that various characters hear in the air. This strikes me as a direct response to the famous alarming twang of the broken string we hear in The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov’s broken string has often been interpreted as a sign of an era coming to an end, the impending collapse of an old way of life represented in a mysterious sound apparently emanating from nature. Mukhina, writing in a time of great turmoil and instability, would most certainly agree that her era has been no less destructive and fragmented than that which Chekhov witnessed. But at the same time, she seems to write about a world in which at least some degree of harmony has remained.
Another writer who can be considered among the heirs to the Chekhovian manner is Mikhail Ugarov (born 1956). In such plays as The Newspaper “Russian Invalid,” Dated July 18…. (produced 1994 by the Osobnyak Theater, St. Petersburg), Deadbeat (produced 1995 by the Theater on Liteiny, St. Petersburg) and Doves (produced 1997 by the Stanislavsky Theater, Moscow) Ugarov offers a dramatic style of extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. Orthography According to Grot (produced 1998 by the Osobnyak Theater, St. Petersburg under the title of Destroyer) offers a tragi-comic picture of a cultured family in decline that can be said, in part, to filter the Chekhovian sensibility through the grotesque and the farcical. Furthermore, its image in the final scenes of a mother gathering her children in preparation for a journey away from their present home can’t help but evoke allusions to the endings of some Chekhov plays. Rather as in Three Sisters, however, this family is going nowhere. By and large, it would be a mistake to seek too zealously in Ugarov’s plays for the quotes and echoes of Chekhov that we occasionally find in the works of other writers. But the temperament and precision of his writing unquestionably share an affinity with Chekhov.
It is not my intent, however, to conduct a detailed discussion of contemporary Russian dramatic writing in the light of Chekhov. It is enough to have brought up these few names, titles and incidents as examples of a larger process wherein the lessons of, and conflicts with, Chekhovian drama continue at full force at the end of the 20th century.
II. THE PRODUCTIONS
If we exclude Yury Lyubimov at the Taganka Theater and Anatoly Vasilyev at the School of Dramatic Art, there was hardly a Moscow director of note who did not stage at least one Chekhov production in the 1990s. Mark Zakharov, Moscow’s king of the Broadway big-show epigones, put on a brash, showy version of The Seagull at the Lenkom Theater in 1994 which he publicly claimed was intended to reverse Chekhov’s reputation as a “boring” playwright. At what is now called Okolo, the Theater Near the Stanislavsky House, Yury Pogrebnichko twice staged Chekhov — Three Sisters (1990) and The Cherry Orchard (1997) — in his inimitable style that invariably sets the action in something reminiscent of a Soviet labor camp no matter who the author or what the play. Pogrebnichko returned to Chekhov again in the fall of 1999 with a show called PRAYER OF CLOWNS. This minor work collated dialogues and monologues about death and aimlessness from several of Chekhov’s plays. Designated as a “cabaret,” it employed romances, arias, folk songs and gypsy tunes that ostensibly were intended to suggest the healing power of art.
In St. Petersburg, Lev Dodin of the Maly Drama Theater staged both The Cherry Orchard (1994) and Play Without a Name (1997, usually known as Platonov in the West). Many of the best productions in such Russian provincial cities as Voronezh, Rostov-on-Don, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk and Kaliningrad were of Chekhov plays. They ran the gamut from the staunchly traditional, such as Forgive Me, My Snow-White Angel (Platonov) directed by Anatoly Ivanov at the Alexei Koltsov Drama Theater in Voronezh (it played in Moscow in 1996), to the aggressively experimental, such as Play Without a Name (Platonov), staged by Yevgeny Marcelli for the Kaliningrad Drama Theater (it played in Moscow in 1998).
Marcelli’s Play Without a Name, performed in four hours and three acts with two intermissions, first immersed the audience in such subtle pseudo-realism that the turning of a newspaper page almost became a major development in the action. The tempo was excruciatingly slow and quiet, the color codes of the lighting and costumes tending toward the pale. Act Two, during which Platonov’s betrayal of his women becomes clear, was handled in deeper, even harsher, emotional tones. Here Platonov (performed with explosive intensity by Grigory Balabaev) was interpreted as a cruel, vindictive man whose forays into the erotic had more to do with frustration and aimlessness than anything else. The speed and abruptness of the action was increased significantly in this segment. The final act presented Platonov’s furious descent to suicide as a kind of escape from the almost violent pursuit to which he was subjected by his various women. Marcelli offered three styles in three acts, beginning with Art Theater-influenced veracity and concluding with a frenzy of action, sound and light leading to death.
Lev Dodin’s version of the same play was also highly unorthodox at least on the surface. It was set on a pier standing over a real basin of water. Between the audience and the water was a sandy beach on which the characters gathered to eat, talk or engage in love trysts. In the water, Platonov made love to Sofya Yegorovna, the wife of his friend Sergei Voinitsev, and when Sofya shot him in despair after learning that he had abandoned her, he fell from the deck into the water and floated there, dead.
As he has in many of his world-famous productions, Dodin sought once again to show off the multiple talents of his troupe. This time he created a jazz-inspired performance in which every actor played at least one instrument. The action was frequently interrupted or accompanied by live performances of jazz from early American rags to Dave Brubeck. Frankly, I failed to understand the point of moving Chekhov’s play into the jazz age. I invariably had the feeling that the intrusive music was artificially forced on the work without any reinterpretation of the material to justify it. My skepticism was increased by the fact that, while Dodin’s actors proved to be diligent music students, they were not capable of achieving the freedom necessary to play real jazz.
As for the psychological interpretations of character, they were largely what I, at least, have come to expect from the Maly Drama Theater. These people looked more like coarse workers and peasants dressed in finery that doesn’t quite suit them than the aimless aristocrats about whom Chekhov wrote. While many observers did not agree with me (this show received the 1998 Golden Mask award for best Russian production of the previous season), I found Dodin’s means to be in pointless conflict with Chekhov’s material. Furthermore, the elaborate, watery set by Alexei Porai-Koshits — echoing a show at Moscow’s Commonwealth of Taganka Actors in 1994 that also put an enormous, real pond in between the actors and the spectators — struck me as more of a gimmick than a necessity. Ultimately, I saw this production’s unusual visual and aural characteristics as a case of form negating content.
Be that as it may, the productions by Dodin and Marcelli of Chekhov’s “lost play,” Platonov, were signs of the time. There was in the mid-1990s a concerted move to stage “unusual” Chekhov. The four major plays were staged regularly, but increasingly one witnessed attempts to work with lesser-known Chekhov texts. That meant numerous productions of Platonov, Ivanov, The Wood Demon, the one-act plays, dramatizations of stories and, in one case, the world premiere of Tatyana Repina, a short piece Chekhov wrote in jest as a gift for Alexei Suvorin in 1889. (More about this Valery Fokin production later.)
The desire to discover a “new” Chekhov, to go beyond the limits the writer established in The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, was felt not only in Russia, but throughout all of Europe. Numerous tours of foreign companies brought to Moscow productions of “minor” Chekhov — Jonathon Kent’s staging of David Hare’s new Englishing of Ivanov for England’s Almeida Theater; Jerzy Jarocki’s production of Platonov: The Final Act for the Polski Theater, Wroclaw; Petr Lebl’s production of Ivanov for the Theater Na Zabradli, Prague; Elmo Nuganen’s production of Platonov under the title of Pianola, or the Player Piano for the Municipal Theater, Tallin.
Meanwhile, in Russian and visiting foreign shows, the productions of the quartet of canonical plays increasingly took on new aspects. Christoph Marthaler’s handling of Three Sisters for the Berlin Volksbühne cast elderly actors in the key roles and appeared to be set in a retirement home; Petr Lebl’s production of The Seagull for the Theater Na Zabradli from Prague was a comical, gimmick-filled work (often attracting the buzzword label of “post-modernist” among critics) that occasionally reminded me of the frenetic frames of a silent movie; Eimuntas Nekrosius’s powerful Three Sisters for the Lithuanian Life Festival was a coarse, at times almost bellicose rendition of Chekhov’s tale of atrophy; Rafael Reyros’s production of Uncle Vanya for the Uncle Vanya Troupe of Cordova, Argentina, set an abridged version of the play in the damp, hot, fertile lands of South America.
Probably the most — though not the only — radical approach to Chekhov among Moscow’s directors was Boris Yukhananov’s Orchard, a dauntingly amorphous, seven-hour production of The Cherry Orchard for the Studio of Individual Directing which played over a two-day period. Yukhananov, a student of Anatoly Vasilyev, created what I might tentatively call a futuristic performance piece in which Martian-like characters moved in a space of huge inflatable objects that suggested an experimental greenhouse gone wild. They spoke with the energy and speed of insects caught in molasses. The work was originally created in 1990 and it continued to evolve in a series of infrequent performances that ran through 1996.
Yukhananov’s production was a bold, occasionally inspired, occasionally unwatchable attempt to establish a contemporary theatrical language for Chekhov’s text. It had the feel of an exalted amateur production in which anti-professionalism and the joyous mockery of tradition were the keynotes. Long, elaborate mimic scenes were acted out on the basis of the simplest verbal exchange between actors. As is common in Yukhananov’s work, the actors simultaneously existed inside and outside the play, often informing us of their “own” attitude to what they were playing by means of their expressions or actions.
In one of the final versions of this work that evolved over a six-year period, Yukhananov employed a half dozen actors with Down’s syndrome who freely moved in and out of the action, sometimes even taking it over and “arresting” the development of Chekhov’s play as they read poetry or engaged in other activities. The sincerity, intensity and simplicity of these actors added a new quality to the director’s deliberate amateurism and raised it to new heights.
It is important to remember that Yukhananov’s seldom-performed and sparsely-attended production was firmly planted in the far-out margins of the theatrical process in Moscow in the 1990s.
Also out of the mainstream were two productions of Chekhov’s one-act plays. Alexei Levinsky mounted interesting stagings of both The Wedding and The Anniversary on a single bill at the Yermolova International Theater Center in 1994, and the pop star Pyotr Mamonov used The Proposal as the basis for a fascinating, pseudo-confessional evening of one-man performance art under the title of Is There Life on Mars? at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater in 1997.
Mamonov played all three characters in selected excerpts from the short play about a lonely provincial landowner trying to bring himself to marry his neighbor’s daughter, and he mixed in long digressions and songs of his own composition. What emerged was a gripping performance about a man at odds with his surroundings at the end of the 20th century. Mamonov, in some of his original asides, drew on the biography of Chekhov and his father, finding aspects in their lives that had meaning for that of his on-stage alter ego. Chekhov’s father, for instance, was “an artist at heart who was so busy with his church choir that his business went to hell.” Chekhov himself, “forced to study the merchant trade,” had “no childhood in his childhood.” With its recorded voices and music interrupting the anecdotal performance and repeatedly sending it off on tangents, this show’s scatter-shot form echoed its content beautifully. When Mamonov declared in mock horror towards the end of the performance that “the end of the 20th century is in just a couple of years and — shit! — there is no modern man,” the audience howled with laughter as it discovered anew one of the key themes that Chekhov had raised a century before.
Alexei Levinsky is a director of quirky tastes who invariably seeks out the incongruous in whatever work he stages. In The Wedding and The Anniversary, he found two plays that easily took on various shades of the eccentric and the grotesque without sacrificing any of the curt efficiency that is always present in Chekhov. Presumably parodying the twanging sound in The Cherry Orchard, Levinsky inserted an occasional goofy boinking sound that could be heard in the background during the performance of The Anniversary. Meanwhile, as delivered in dead-pan performances, Chekhov’s texts burst forth with a delightful craziness that offered entertainment and insight alike. At times, one was surprised to sense in these performances the distinct affinity between Chekhov and the great comic writer Nikolai Gogol.
Far less radical than the Yukhananov or Mamonov shows, though as subtly and soundly unconventional as Levinsky’s was Sergei Afanasyev’s production of Uncle Vanya for the Novosibirsk City Drama Theater. It performed in Moscow in June 1998 as part of the Third Chekhov International Theater Festival. The shift in the vision of this show was visible immediately thanks to the set by Vladimir Fateev. Rather than a well-outfitted country estate, it depicted a modest, homey, two-story hut, something along the lines of a simple, log-cabin dacha. The fine acting and shrewd directing was reverent to Chekhov’s text and respectful of the Chekhov performance tradition. At the same time, it left plenty of room for new twists and accents on familiar characters and scenes. As a result, this show emerged as an affectionate exploration of the naivite, simplicity, earthiness and disorderliness of the Russian way of life. It invariably maintained a delicate balance between the humor and the despair that are inherent in the play.
Astrov, as played by Vladimir Lemeshonok, was acerbic, sensitive and intelligent, and he carried the play’s darkness with wit and dignity. His aborted love affair with Yelena was played as one suspects it would have been “in life” — their final kiss before Yelena’s departure was a tentative, clumsy, hurried peck on the lips that left both embarrassed and dissatisfied with themselves. Uncle Vanya, as played by Sergei Novikov, was a tragicomic figure, a man at odds with his own life and mileau and yet one who is more apt to evoke in us laughter or smiles than tragic empathy.
As Afanasyev’s production of Uncle Vanya unfolded, it struck me increasingly as a show that reavealed strangeness as one of the key features of the human experience. Vanya says it and Astrov admits it, too — they have, over time, become “strange” people, oddballs. Strange, because the demands that life makes, the desires that people have and the possibilities that exist for realizing those desires are so narrow and so inconsistent that people are forced into becoming something other than what they expect or wish. Astrov even suggests that it is a human’s natural state to be an oddball. Afanasyev carefully and clearly raised that profound insight of Chekhov’s play to the level of a lietmotif. The notion of incongruity was played out everywhere, even in the sounds of a workman plunking out on his balalaika a majesterial melody made famous by Chaliapin.
Unexpected turns and details throughout the performance caused us to shake the cobwebs from our set perceptions of the play. During the opening dialogue between Astrov and the old nanny, Telegin playfully hid behind a tall curtain and scared the wits out of the nanny when he jumped out. This, and the nanny’s uncontrollable hiccupping as she spoke, replaced the customary wistfulness of the initial scene with good, hard humor. Another of the numerous recalibrations took place at the end of Chekhov’s second act where Sonya informs Yelena that she is forbidden to play the piano. In Afanasyev’s version, before Sonya returned with the ban from Serebryakov, all of the residents of the home gathered happily in anticipation of hearing Yelena play. When they heard the bad news, they all responded by breaking into song themselves.
And yet, despite the warmth and affection that this show bestowed upon Chekhov’s flawed characters, it did not lose sight of the darkness lying behind their experience. Astrov did not leave in the penultimate scene, he instead remained motionless as a stone statue and unseen by the other characters during Sonya’s final dialogue with Vanya. This was not only a fulfilment of Astrov’s words that he does not want to go home, it was also the director’s way of freezing Astrov’s image for us so that it, too, not only Sonya’s exhortations to live, work and rest, would act upon us as the play came to a close. There he was, Vanya’s twin oddball, staring out at us as a light rain began to fall and Chaliapin’s velvet bass echoed in the air.
Chekhov’s drama, and Uncle Vanya in particular, allowed at least one theater to achieve heights usually beyond its reach. Mark Rozovsky’s Theater u Nikitskikh Vorot, or Theater at Nikitsky Gates, came into being in 1983 as a semi-professional company in Moscow whose distinguishing feature was its energy and willingness to attempt productions of plays or scripts others would not. The predominant style at the theater was and remains one of light, fast, loose, musical entertainment. It was for that reason that Rozovsky’s production of Uncle Vanya in 1993, timed to mark the theater’s tenth anniversary, surprised many with its depth and power.
There was nothing innovative about this work. It was a clean, pure, sensitive handling of the play. The closest thing in it to a variation on the routine was Vladimir Dolinsky’s handling of Serebryakov. This professor was a man with a sense of humor and a good understanding of life. He knew perfectly well that his pretty young wife would have attractions to other men and he was content to close his eyes to them. But what made this show memorable was the traditional atmosphere that provided the opportunity for sensitive performances. Aside from Dolinsky’s fine turn as Serebryakov, Vera Ulik was a commanding presence in the relatively small role of Maria Voinitskaya, Serebryakov’s mother-in-law. Meanwhile, Viktoria Zaslavskaya’s inspired performance of Sonya as an intense young woman pursued by demons became the centerpiece of this show.
Rozovsky, sensing that his production had raised the stakes at his little theater, sought to justify the new expectations that naturally followed. He published a book, Reading ‘Uncle Vanya’, containing his copious notes on the play interspersed amidst Chekhov’s full text. More than anything, however, they come across as aimless and often banal ramblings that do little to explain why the prodution came together so well. In fact, the success of Rozovsky’s Uncle Vanya almost immediately engendered a crisis at the theater. The director’s next few attempts at serious drama — Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade — paled markedly by comparison.
That is not to say that staging Chekhov was easy or that it guaranteed success. Rozovsky perhaps overachieved with his production of Uncle Vanya, but that was to his distinct credit: His production was a legitimate triumph. More often than not, the traditional approach at other theaters produced little of interest.
Two productions by Galina Volchek at the Sovremennik Theater — Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard — gained some notoreity in New York when the theater performed there on tours in 1996 and 1997, respectively. However, neither of these conventional shows was of especial note in Moscow. Three Sisters was an old production that had been running since the previous decade, while The Cherry Orchard was the case of an old show that had dropped out of the repertoire being renovated quickly with a new cast, sets and costumes in order to take it to America.
New York also saw Oleg Yefremov’s 1997 staging of Three Sisters at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater during a February 1998 tour at the BAM Opera House. It was the first Chekhov production at the Art Theater since 1991 (Dmitry Brusnikin’s staging of Platonov) and the first of Three Sisters since Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s famous 1940 version. Yefremov’s production was an underachiever supported by an aggressive publicity campaign intended to create the impression that it was a major hit. In fact, the most concise commentary I have seen belongs to Vincent Canby, who wrote that the show was “far more interesting to talk about than to sit through.”
What I suspect Canby had in mind was the production’s interpretation of the play as a “swan song,” a farewell to a way of life and an era. In Yefremov’s finale, the Prozorov home slowly receded upstage, leaving the sisters alone in the woods, as it were. This was certainly Yefremov’s own statement on his position at the theater he has run since 1971 and on his position in a theater world that has, to a great extent, passed him and his theater by in the 1990s. This, indeed, was grist for the critical mill and it evoked some eloquent writing on the part of those who shared Yefremov’s emotional stance. The problem was that, as a piece of theater, this Three Sisters was plain boring. It was excruciatingly long (it was cut considerably for the New York run because of union regulations), blandly acted and it seemed to have been staged more with an eye to history than to the spectators who would see it.
A scourge of the Chekhov legacy that was strong in the 1990s was the notion of detail and meticulousness. Where fine-tuned, lifelike sounds, gestures, expressions and the like may have been a major discovery when Stanislavsky originally began applying them to Chekhov’s plays, they were more often the signs of hard-crusted cliches one-hundred years later. Yefremov and Volchek, the honored son and daughter of the Moscow Art Theater school, were not alone in perpetrating that hackneyed style.
Sergei Zhenovach’s production of The Wood Demon (an early version of Uncle Vanya) at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater in 1993 was so steeped in the cliches of aimless, actionless Chekhov, that it occasionally appeared to be a cruel parody. The opening scene of the characters breakfasting on the terrace of the Voinitsky country home ran a full half-hour and featured lots of chewing, swallowing and clinking of glasses.
Similarly, three other Chekhov productions in 1993 — Mikhail Feigin’s staging of Ivanov at the Stanislavsky Theater; Alexander Sabinin’s staging of Uncle Vanya for the Et Cetera Theater; and Sergei Solovyov’s handling of Vanya for the Maly Theater — were heavy on chirping crickets, sighs and glances cast askew. All began evoking yawns in the early goings of the first act.
Solovyov, a respected film director, earned a dubious theatrical reputation by taking on several Chekhov plays. He began by mounting a theatrical production of Three Sisters with his students at VGIK, the State Institute of Cinematography, and then moved on to big-budget productions of Vanya at the Maly and The Seagull at the Commonwealth of Taganka Actors (1994), a venue that had broken away from Yury Lyubimov’s Taganka Theater. The latter is the show that made the biggest splash, literally, because an enormous real pond covered the entire front half of the stage. It was so big that the first six rows of seats had to be removed to make room for it. But neither of Solovyov’s two professional productions indicated that he knew what to do with live actors on a stage. The shows’ extraordinarily elaborate sets (Vanya was designed by Valery Levental; Seagull was designed by Alexander Borisov and Vladimir Arefyev) buried weak acting and misguided direction under the weight of minute and often useless detail that were far more suited to film than theater.
A better example of a director and designer working together was Genrietta Yanovskaya’s collaboration with Sergei Barkhin on her production of Ivanov at the Young Spectator Theater in 1993. Barkhin’s set of rusty, corroding walls and columns teetering on the verge of collapse visually expressed the state of inner decay that, to one extent or another, affects every character in the play.
This production might arguably be seen now as the one that kicked off the Chekhov boom in the 1990s. It was not the first. Other excellent productions that preceded it included Yury Pogrebnichko’s eclectic Three Sisters (1990) at what is now called Okolo, the Theater Near the Stanislavsky House and Sergei Artsibashev’s sensitive and intimate Three Sisters (1991) at the Theater na Pokrovke. Boris Yukhananov’s experimental Orchard had appeared in 1990 and another student of Anatoly Vasilyev, Viktor Sibilyov, had created a languorous, deeply philosophical rendition of Platonov under the title of Fatherlessness in 1991 at what was called the Sibilyov Studio. But the efforts by Yukhananov and Sibilyov were too small to have had much impact, while the Pogrebnichko and Artsibashev stagings of Three Sisters, unique and even unorthodox as they were, did not yet signal the desire truly to break out of the traditional Chekhovian limits.
Yanovskaya did that by tackling a “minor” Chekhov play and refusing to be limited by the canonical text. In an effort to open Chekhov up and strike more deeply at his essence, Yanovskaya brought into Ivanov secondary characters from several other plays. Yepikhodov, Simeonov-Pishchik and mirror-image twins of Charlotta from The Cherry Orchard; Waffles from Uncle Vanya; and Masha from The Seagull all became bit players and hangers-on in the drama that may be Chekhov’s darkest. If Platonov is murdered by a jealous lover in Platonov, in Ivanov the title character drifts further and further into depression until the only solution left him is suicide. Yanovskaya, anticipating the theme that Sergei Afanasyev would bring out in his version of Uncle Vanya — the human’s natural state of being an oddball or a misfit — introduced a whole gallery of lonely, forelorn and misunderstood characters. They moved in and around the events of Ivanov, not interfering with or changing them, but showing them off in a new light.
At the same time, there was nothing lethargic or indolent about any of the characters in Yanovskaya’s production that ran under the title of Ivanov and Others. All of the principals — Ivanov, his wife Anna and his lover Sasha — were people with full-blooded personalities and at least some sense of personal direction. That does not mean it did them any good. The alienation that eventually drives Ivanov to suicide took its toll on everyone. In place of the customary Chekhovian sounds of crickets and crackling twigs, Yanovskaya arranged occasional deafening fireworks displays that, like the passions in the play, flared up and just as quickly fizzled out again.
Each of those whom I consider comprise the Big Three among innovative contemporary Moscow directors — Kama Ginkas, Pyotr Fomenko and Valery Fokin — approached Chekhov from unorthodox angles.
Fomenko dashed off a fun staging of the one-act play, The Wedding, with some students at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts in 1997. It was not a major production, but it was a fine example of what we might call “notes in the margins” of a major artist’s work. Its handling of the story about a wedding party involving a boorish groom, a bashful bride and her eccentric family and guests featured much of the buoyant, light energy, the irony and the inventiveness that marks the director’s style on the whole.
Fomenko removed the play’s action — essentially talk at a banquet table — to various corners of a small hall at the Russian Academy of Theater Arts (RATI). At times, two or more conversations were in progress simultaneously in different places; usually one of them was brought to the fore. In once instance, the whole party got up for a huge round dance that encircled all the spectators.
By breaking the action into duets and trios taking place in various enclaves, Fomenko increased the intimacy of the work. As we witnessed various incidents signaling the incompatibility of the newlyweds — the sensitive bride helping the shaken Captain Revunov-Karaulov leave when he has been insulted, or the sounds of the brutish groom viciously beating up the telegraph operator Ivan Yat’ off-stage — in another position on stage, we observed the comic scene of the midwife Anna nearly stripping and raping the tongue-tied Greek Kharlampy Dymba.
As is common in a Fomenko production, many of the simple scenes were couched in actions that provided shrewd commentary or were expanded into elaborate mini-shows of their own. For example, the bride and groom’s first dry kiss was captured for posterity by a photographer who used sparklers for his flash bulb — the kiss fizzled out before the sparklers did. Or, in the scene of the Captain’s story about a storm at sea, the entire hall seemed engulfed in a toy hurricane as water was splashed out of bottles, ropes hanging across the stage swayed violently, and people were thrown about as if caught in torrential wind and rain. The Captain had encouraged all the partygoers present to join hands and the image they cut was one of the flag-trimmed rigging of a ship tossed at sea.
At the performance I attended, Fomenko sat upstairs in a booth and grinned from ear to ear as the audience burst into applause when the storm-at-sea scene reached its climax. Fomenko’s production of The Wedding was no landmark, but its lively, imaginative approach illuminated a few details in both the director’s creative biography and in the chronology of Chekhov’s plays on the Russian stage in the 1990s.
Kama Ginkas can only marginally be included in this discussion, although the picture of Chekhov as interpreted by Russian directors at the end of the 20th century would be incomplete without him. Between 1988 and 1996, Ginkas staged three productions of Chekhov in Helsinki, Finland — Ward No. 6 (1988) and Life is Beautiful (1995) at the Lilla Theater, and The Seagull (1996) at the Swedish Theater Academy of Helsinki. I have seen only partial videotapes of the latter two shows and, therefore, cannot offer substantive observations about them. I can, however, describe one key incident in Life is Beautiful — a combination of the stories, “The Lady with the Lapdog” and “Rothschild’s Violin” — which illustrates beautifully the way Ginkas applied his uniquely concrete and metaphorical style of directing to Chekhov.
In the scene in “The Lady with the Lapdog” where Gurov and Anna consummate their affair, the pair methodically stretch a long, narrow piece of canvas between them until it is taut. Anna lies down on the beach-sand-covered floor and holds the canvas swath flush with the base of her abdomen. Gurov ascends to a position high above her and begins gently releasing small handfuls of tiny stones — Ginkas points out that they are the kind one finds on the beaches in Yalta — that chaotically roll down the canvas chute which both separates and unites the lovers. The stones, reminding us of seeds, rattle and tick as they slide down the chute, tumbling and spilling onto Anna’s abdomen, breast and neck.
This is vintage Ginkas — a combination of austere realism (Gurov’s almost literal insemination of Anna) with a powerful metaphor (the canvas chute and beach stones are anything but graphic sexual symbols).
By Ginkas’s own admission, Chekhov is central to his perception of his own art. In a 1997 interview, Ginkas stated that he considers The Cherry Orchard “the greatest and most difficult play ever written,” and he linked Gurov with some of the Dostoevskian characters he has encountered in various productions based on Crime and Punishment.
“Even when I staged ‘The Lady with the Lapdog,'” Ginkas said, “I was staging Crime and Punishment. Chekhov’s idea of crime there is that a man [Gurov] has existed senselessly, without meaning. He lived forty years and was punished by Life which brought him love.
“Love as punishment. Love as a trial. That is very Russian. And very much Chekhov.”
Ginkas’s Helsinki production of The Seagull was mounted in a former factory building that allowed the director to play theatrical games with reality and make-believe.
At the center was an enormous four-meter by five-meter window that looked out on a real lake and island and offered an obstructed view of the Helsinki skykline in the distance on the opposite shore. This panorama was revealed to the spectators only when Treplev gave the signal to begin the performance of his play: He set on fire the stage curtain which burned away to disclose the sight of the lake, island and city. Inside the building where the performance took place, birch trees stood about on the dirt floor among the spectators. According to Ginkas, the real landscape on the other side of the window appeared as a picture — an artifice — because of the frame of the window, while the counterfeit woods surrounding the spectators appeared as real.
Valery Fokin pulled off a coup of sorts by staging in 1998 the world premiere of what was more or less legitimately billed as a forgotten Chekhov play. Tatyana Repina was a short piece that Chekhov wrote in jest in 1889 as a response to a play of the same name by Alexei Suvorin. The latter eventually had a few copies printed at his printing house, but it wasn’t until long after Chekhov’s death that the piece was actually published. To my knowledge, and to the knowledge of the producers — the Avignon Festival in France and Moscow’s Young Spectator Theater — Fokin was the first to have staged the play, 109 years after it was written.
Suvorin’s play, designated as a comedy, treats the topic of Sabinin, a man who casts aside his actress lover in order to marry a younger, wealthier girl. However, it ends with the suicide of the actress Repina and leaves the fate of Sabinin’s wedding to the spectator’s imagination. Chekhov, as a gift for Suvorin, sat down and in one sitting — according to his own admission he wrote it in one day — created a sequel that revealed what occured at the wedding following Repina’s death. Much of the text is merely copied out of the Orthodox rites for weddings, although something of an independent plot does emerge. The guests at the wedding whisper and chat as the service proceeds — they gossip about how nice the bride looks and about how a series of copycat suicides have come in the wake of Repina’s suicide. The main “event” of the playlet is the appearance of a woman in black, in whom Sabinin believes he recognizes Repina.
Fokin, a director whose mystical tendencies had already received expression in such productions as A Hotel Room in the Town of NN (a dramatization of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls for the Meyerhold Arts Center, 1994) and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Satirikon Theater and Meyerhold Arts Center, 1995), turned out what may have been his most mystical and most expressionistic production to date. It certainly was the most otherworldly version of Chekhov I had ever seen.
The spectators were seated in checkerboard fashion on the stage itself, thus allowing the actors to wander among them. The set, designed by Sergei Barkhin, was a relatively thorough and realistic representation of a dark, candle-lit interior of an Orthodox church. The music by Alexander Bakshi echoed Russian liturgical music, but used rhythms and offered digressions that made the originality of the compositions evident. As in many of Fokin’s productions in the 1990s, the text played a minimal role. More important in communicating events and inner states were the expressions on the characters’ faces, their movement among us on the stage and their manner of interaction with one another. To fill out Chekhov’s sparse script, Fokin added a piece of Nina Zarechnaya’s monologue from the fourth act of The Seagull. This famous segment — “I am a seagull…” — was pronounced by the actress playing Repina (the French actress Consuelo de Haviland who performed partly in Russian, partly in French) and was presumably audible only to Sabinin and the spectators. The remainder of the characters in the play were oblivious to the trauma that Sabinin was experiencing.
Fokin essentially presented three planes of experience at once — the real, the imagined and the supernatural. On one level, we heard the banal mutterings of the people mingling at a wedding; on another we became privy to the heightened anxiety and inner fears that tortured the groom as he stood at the altar; and on another still we were witness to the materialization of Sabinin’s fears in the form of the black-draped Repina. All three of these layers existed simultaneously in a unified time and place.
I would be remiss were I not to add that Fokin’s production of Tatyana Repina was probably more interesting in theory and conception than in fact. The 70-minute performance was so sketchy that it never developed into a work of significant impact. Furthermore, I suspect that Chekhov wrote this piece with his tongue planted firmly in cheek, something one would not recognize in Fokin’s eerie, uncanny production. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that Fokin found about the only way to stage this strange, small piece. In any case, Tatyana Repina reinforced our opinions that Fokin’s interest in mysticism runs deep while it also provided an unusual approach to Chekhov’s drama. Whether or not it will open the way for others to explore Chekhov as a writer with supernatural tendencies remains to be seen.
III. CONCLUSION
The fascination of Russian theaters with Chekhov in the 1990s occasionally had a certain frenzy about it. There were battles raging in most of the productions of his plays. Some attempted to reassert Chekhov’s position as the great source of Russian realistic drama and theater, some attempted to co-opt him as a voice that spoke the language of the avant-garde.
What no one doubted, I am sure, was that Chekhov was now the standard-bearer. In Russian drama, Ostrovsky had acquired the position of the great encyclopedist of Russian mores while Gogol and Dostoevsky were recognized as great guides through the tortuous labyrinth of the Russian soul. But Chekhov not only provided an unparalleled vision of the Russian character and the Russian’s place in society and nature, he created a dramatic form that was so pliant it could be bent to nearly any purpose and still respond with vigor.
When I think of the position Chekhov’s drama occupied in Russia in the 1990s, I often return to Pyotr Mamonov’s rock-music-inspired performance show based on The Proposal. Certainly there were greater productions, but none surpassed the vitality, the immediacy and the intensity that Mamonov’s had. Moreover, to the horror of all those neglected living playwrights who have not been able to break Chekhov’s domination of the stage, there seems to be no sign that Chekhov’s ability to speak to new generations is waning. The hall for Mamonov’s Is There Life on Mars? was invariably packed with teenagers and people in their twenties. They might have been there to see Mamonov, but they understood exactly what Chekhov was saying.
Mamonov sent his audience into paroxysms of laughter when he, in the guise of Stepan Chubukov, the father of the potential bride in The Proposal, blurted out that fateful question: “Why don’t I put a bullet in my brain? Why haven’t I yet cut myself to ribbons?”
Chekhov’s drama, not unlike that of Shakespeare, has risen above distinctions of time, place, style and even fashion. It is universal and it is always modern. That is why Chekhov was front-row center in the Russian theatrical process at the end of the 20th century.
NOTES
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