A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  5.4.4 The Nation, 3 June 1911 A Russian comedy of manners

  The dramatic critic of the “Times” has never seemed quite happy since, in writing on two interesting plays by Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Fagan, he was asked to believe in the existence of a modern newspaper proprietor. […] But having witnessed nothing in life remotely resembling, say, the illustrious patron of Printing House Square, he was naturally shocked at the invraisemblance of these stage pictures of the new journalism. Judge Brack was right; people did not do such things, for there were no such people to do them. I see that Mr. Walkley is not less dissatisfied with the psychology of Tchekov’s comedy, “The Cherry Orchard.” His first impulse is to conceive that the extreme childishness, the irrationality, of the characters in this play are due to the fact that they are foreigners. Then, perhaps on the reflection that they are Russian, and that Russians are at least civilised enough to go to Paris, Mr. Walkley concludes that it is the fault of the translator, and also that British actors cannot impart quite the right touch to a study of Russian types and Russian manners. And then, again, he reverts to the notion that there is something inherently un-English in setting upon the stage what he calls “queer, outlandish, even silly” types of human beings. If, therefore, Mr. Walkley’s impeachment be not of Nature herself for thoughtless differentiation from her own average, we must assume that Tchekov’s theme and his treatment of it are thoroughly abnormal. “You are shown,” he tells us, “a family drifting to ruin.” Strange to say, the owner is an “improvident, sentimental, feather-pated creature.” She sees the old inheritance, beloved cherry-orchard and all, slipping away, and “can only wring her hands,” or offer gold to beggars while her servants’ wages are unpaid. This unheard-of character is surrounded by other eccentrics, such as borrowers, drunkards, dreamers who talk and never act, bores, triflers, “doddering” or “knavish” servants, and various creatures that “seem children who have never grown up.”

  It may occur to a mere unilluminated observer of the processes of things that such persons are the very insignia and provocation of “family ruin”; that it is just through such a procession of harpies, parasites, idlers, fainéants, and “dodderers” that all families, all States, all individuals, all institutions -e.g., the House of Lords, in this year and moment of grace – come to grief; in a word, that if Tchekov’s theme is suitable for treatment on the stage, you could not have a more fidy designed group of human accessories than that which Mr. Walkley describes. […] “A Cherry Orchard” is not Bloomsbury, but it is life; and it happens to be a corner of life which has been more closely and brilliantly explored by great literary men than any other part of modern Europe.

  So, having led Mr. Walkley thus far, it is possible that we may induce him to go a little farther. The ruin of an old family, who are not fit to last, and who betray themselves to their fall, is not a bad dramatic theme; nay, by the bones of the house of Atreus; it is a good one! And Mr. Walkley, by his catalogue raisonné of the characters in “The Cherry Orchard,” makes it clear that Anton Tchekov knew exactly what he was doing, and, choosing to make a tragi-comedy of his play, selected the right kind of agents and environment; while, being also a Russian, dealing with Russians, he gives it just that added touch of impracticability, of childlike sentimental helplessness, which we know to be a trifle more obviously Russian than it would be English. But at this point one feels a little difficulty, a little delicacy. For how could a critic of Mr. Walkley’s experience and fastidiousness fail to see that Tchekov’s characterisation is like fine lace-work as to detail, as well as of all but the greatest ironic power as to general conception and workmanship? Why, Madame Ranevsky is a jewel! She is as perfect an architect of ruin as Lord Rosebery, and her style is his to a T. Miss Katharine Pole gave a very brilliant and charming representation of her, but erred in making her an affected, “precious,” fine lady, when, in reality, she is a piece of exquisite nothingness, equally sincere in her adoration of her beautiful orchard and her incapacity to keep it, in her love of Paris and her country home, of her lover and her child, her piety and her intrigue, her sweetness and her tantrums, her selfishness and her considerateness – withal an adorable piece of useless femininity, such as I have thought an amateur of the sex would have loved at first sight. Such a picture of inconstant helplessness would in itself make the fortune of any play with an audience of average wits. But Tchekov has built round his portrait of the lovely Madame Ranevsky the prettiest predella of absurdities, such as some Italian artists use to relieve the gravity of their main theme. Such are the ridiculous land-owner, Semyonov-Pishtchik; borrowing (not vainly) of the bankrupt; the German governess, diverting them with silly card tricks; the “doddering” old butler, who thinks he alone keeps the whole rocking concern upright; and, best of all, the shabby, preaching, young-old student, who lolls on his stomach as he discourses of duty, the sanctity of work, and the chastened glories of the society of the future. Such is the cunning ex-peasant, tongue-tied, as Mr. Walkley says, but with the gift of action, which this amiable, moon-struck, talking society lacks; no gentleman, neither a villain nor a hero, but fit to turn the key of the front-door on his old masters and mint the clay of the cherry-orchard into gold.

  It seems a little late in the day, not to say a trifle pedantic and irrelevant, to quarrel that the technique of such a play on the ground that it is a mixture of “pure pathos” and “genuine”, comedy and “knock-about farce.” […] It does vary between harsh and delicate effects; indeed, its subject is so balanced in actual life, for a cause or a social class that falls by its own folly is by turns pathetic, merely unwise, and wildly ridiculous. Tchekov’s irony is at its root a sad and profound sentiment, as we discern in the closing scene of “The Cherry Orchard,” when as, in the deserted house, doors bang and keys turn gratingly in the lock, and the shutters are closed, shutting out the cheerful sounds of life, and only admitting a glint of its day, the poor old “doddering” white-haired butler, forgotten in the family’s hurried half-joyful departure, creeps into the darkened room, mutters that his master has left his fur-coat behind, and will assuredly catch cold, and stretches himself out in a sleep that looks like death. And this of course, is the key of the play, which is thus a comedy and a farce and a tragedy in the sense in which life is all these things, being made up of change and loss, and a certain sparkling recovery, and a grimly ludicrous, ironic, riotous play of unknown forces over it all.

  H. W.M

  *

  By the time of the second London production in 1920 – following the trauma of the First World War, and echoing a general sense of the destruction of European civilization in its aftermath – Chekhov had become anglicized by adoption. J. Middleton Murry put it most succinctly in declaring “Today we feel how intimately Tchekov belongs to us” (Aspects of Literature, 1920). Virginia Woolf, for instance, read her own stream of consciousness writing into The Cherry Orchard, though significantly she picked up on a similar musical analogy to Meyerhold:

  It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself or to trouble himself, that he refers to atmosphere. And, given time, something might be said in greater detail of the causes which produced this atmosphere – the strange dislocated sentences, each so erratic and yet cutting out the shape so firmly, of the realism, of the humour, of the artistic unity. But let the word atmosphere be taken literally to mean that Chekhov has contrived to shed over us a luminous vapour in which life appears as it is, without veils, transparent and visible to the depths. Long before the play was over, we seemed to have sunk below the surface of things and to be feeling our way among submerged but recognizable emotions. ‘I have no proper passport. I don’t know how old I am; I always feel I am still young’ – how the words go sounding on in one’s mind – how the whole play resounds with such sentences, which reverberate, melt into each other and pass far away out behind everything! In short, if it is permissible to use such vague language, I do not know how better to describe the sensation at the end of The Ch
erry Orchard, than by saying that it sends one into the street feeling like a piano played upon at last, not in the middle only but all over the keyboard and with the lid left open so the sound goes on.

  New Statesman, 24 July 1920

  The Cherry Orchard remained in the Moscow Art Theatre repertoire as their signature performance, becoming in some ways a museum piece. With Olga Knipper now playing Ranevskaya, it was toured through Europe in 1922, when the young director Michel Saint-Denis saw their production in Paris. His reaction clearly indicates the way Naturalism, already by then becoming the standard for mainstream theatre that young experimental artists fought against, continued to be a vital force in twentieth-century staging, particularly through Chekhov. It is also an early demonstration of the degree to which Chekhov’s plays became identified with Stanislavsky’s productions, making his acting System so influential. Indeed, though coming out of Jacques Copeau’s anti-naturalistic theatre company, Saint-Denis kept his interest in Chekhov, directing a much-praised Three Sisters in 1939, and The Cherry Orchard in 1961.

  A later Moscow Art Theatre tour, which presented The Cherry Orchard (as well as The Three Sisters) in London in 1938, is a good example of how Stanislavsky’s original tragic and political interpretation of the play in the first production had become emphasized to the point of distortion. It also demonstrated, in contrast to the type of naturalistic acting pioneered by André Antoine and apparently promoted in Stanislavsky’s theoretical writings, the extent to which the actual style of acting his own productions was declarative and overfly theatrical, corresponding in fact to the style required by Bernard Shaw.

  5.4.5 Michel Saint-Denis, Chekhov’s impact in Europe

  “Style and Reality”, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, Heinemann, 1960

  In 1922 Stanislavsky came to Paris with the Moscow Art Theatre. They played at the Théàtre des Champs Elysées. There we all went, all the students together, very smart, a little ready to laugh in advance: we were going to see those realists, those naturalistic people, the contemporaries of old Antoine! We saw The Cherry Orchard that night and we stopped laughing very quickly. There is a moment in the first act of The Cherry Orchard when all the characters return from a trip to Paris, worn out by days and nights in the train. They enter the nursery; Madame Ranevsky pauses to admire and feel the old room, full of memories, and Anya, her young daughter of seventeen, who has been brought up in that nursery, jumps on to a sofa and, crouching on it, is caught up by a fit of that high-pitched laughter which is induced by a combination of tiredness and emotion. And on that piece of wordless acting the audience of two thousand five hundred people burst into applause. Later on in the third act, Olga Knipper Chekhova, the wife of Chekhov, playing Madame Ranevsky, takes a cup of tea from the old servant while she is engaged in talking to someone else. Her hand shakes, she’s burnt by the tea, drops the cup which falls on the ground and breaks. Fresh burst of applause. Why? Because the reality of this action was so complete, so untheatrically managed as to be striking even from a distance. It was enough to create enthusiasm. I had the opportunity of asking Stanislavski how he had achieved such balanced and convincing reality. He replied, ‘Oh it’s very stupid. She couldn’t get it. We rehearsed for seven months but she still couldn’t get it; so one day I told the stage manager to put boiling water in the cup. And he did.’ I couldn’t help saying – I was twenty-five at the time, (but that man was wonderful) – ‘Yes, that was stupid.’ He laughed, Tt was absolutely stupid. But you have to do everything, anything, even stupid things, to get what you need in the theatre.’

  Earlier that evening we had taken Stanislavski to see Sganarelle ou Le Cocu Imaginaire at the Comédie Frangaise. It was a traditional production but there was an extraordinary actor in it, Jean Dehelly, already old, who revealed to me what lightness, what virtuosity can be reached by a juvenile in a classical farce. His performance was exquisitely true in its youthful artificiality – like a butterfly. But Stanislavski did not seem to appreciate this kind of acting. When we went out he said, ‘You see my friends, we had a very good example tonight in that old theatre of what not to do.’ That was all.

  This visit of Stanislavski and his company was of incalculable importance to me. For the first time our classical attitude towards the theatre, our efforts to bring a new reality to acting, a reality transposed from life, were confronted by a superior form of modern realism, the realism of Chekhov. Stanislavski was then at his best; all the great names were in the company; the Russian Revolution was only five years old.

  5.4.6 Laurence Kitchin, The Moscow Art Theatre in London, 1938

  If the M.A.T. compels readjustment of ideas about Chekhov even when considered at the Saint-Denis level of direction, it makes other productions seem to have borne the relationship to these plays of Pater’s dreamy Mona Lisa to Leonardo’s portrait; the enigmatic sadness of the original caught and the virile statement, along with the earthiness of the subject, left out. Compared with English productions the lighting alone is as brilliant in impact as the primary colours hitting one for the first time from a masterpiece recently cleaned. […] In The Cherry Orchard the tree tops, loaded with blossom and translucent behind crystalline windows, join with a room very sparingly furnished and a dawn as bracing as the opening act of Oklahoma! to weigh the scales heavily on the side of youth. Anya, a coltish schoolgirl with pigtails, is at home in this room, more than anyone else. After all, it is still called the nursery.

  This play has been out of the repertoire for eleven years, allegedly awaiting a replacement of Kachalov, the last Gaiev. We know Chekhov wanted the brighter side of it emphasized, but certain aspects of this version are questionable. In flat contradiction to the ‘oppressive sense of emptiness’ asked for in his stage directions to the last act, the set looks even gayer when its meagre furnishings are covered up; it looks suitable, in fact, for conversion to a recreation room in the most hygienic of youth hostels, and in the only movement undeniably external to Chekhov, Anya and Trofimov strike an attitude reminiscent of propaganda posters as they make their final exit. Still, explicitly in the text, she does say good-bye to the old life and he greets the new. The lines ask for attitudes, though perhaps not that one. Then bronzed workmen are glimpsed outside, closing the shutters and leaving Firs to die in a room gendy dappled with sunbeams through the apertures. It is as benign a stage death as you ever saw, mellow Shakespearian Chekhov.

  If there are some brash lighting and scenic effects hardly to be expected from the ‘austere’ M.A.T., the sound effects are astounding. Instead of a few apologetic chirps in The Cherry Orchard, there is an all-out dawn chorus and later a solo from a cuckoo. […] As for the mysterious sound of a string snapping ‘as if out of the sky’ in The Cherry Orchard, it is deep, plangent, and in context disturbing beyond imagination. Considered side by side with the décor and lighting, this use of sound leads one on to the impression of virile energy – conveyed at times with an almost childish directness as when the clumsy Yepikhodov collides with a door-post – which impregnates the M.A.T.’s acting. Supreme ensemble work was expected of it, but not the rampant individualism attainable within the pattern, not the savage power of Gribov in Chebutikin’s drunkenness, not this panache and violence, with more than a hint of Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, in Chekhov; and certainly not the revelation of supposedly minor-key naturalistic plays, even when seen from the back row of Sadler’s Wells’ circle, is broadly theatrical, at times operatic.

  The M.A.T. has developed a way of presenting the intimacies of Chekhov in a pattern of external effects which accommodates all the familiar reticences, hesitations, and interruptions of the dialogue without relying on fleeting, inspirational expressions of the eyes and other minutiae that invite camera close-ups. Whatever Stanislavsky may have taught about ignoring the audience, actors are aligned on it, one often standing behind another when talking to him in a position absolutely meaningless anywhere except on the stage. The relevance of this to drama in general is obvious when you recall the
constant attacks on naturalism as something remote, finicky, antitheatrical, and so forth. As practised by the M.A.T. it is none of these things; they behave as if the so-called fourth wall were a crowded auditorium, as it really is. Hence the slight swagger, the hint of conscious artifice admired in public, which prevents the disciplined actions from appearing mechanical; hence the happy, relaxed faces enjoying applause at the finish.

  It was this traditionally theatrical projection of voice and gesture, carried over for very different purposes from the kind of drama Stanislavsky despised, which (along with some unashamedly obvious effects) gave the Sadler’s Wells performances their inexpected freshness and punch.

  […]

  For violent impact Lopakhin’s assumption of ownership in The Cherry Orchard is a case in point. Following Chekhov’s expectation that Stanislavsky would choose the part for himself, and his reminder that Varya would not love a boor, Lukyanov plays him for the first two acts in a respectable loose-limbed, restless way, exasperated, kind, and impatient. Getting things done in this environment, he lets us know, is like swimming in treacle, the more frustrating the better your normal rhythm. After the sale he comes in unobtrusively and sits quietly on a settee. What sets him off is Varya’s action in throwing the keys on the floor, and to mark this she does not just toss them down, but crashes them down directly in front of her, centre stage, with an overarm movement. Alone with Ranevskaya, he begins his triumphant tirade sitting down, rises after a few lines as if lifted by his own mounting emotion and picks the keys up. He throws them a yard or so in the air and catches them, right-handed in a movement like a punch which carries his whole body up stage towards the ballroom; he storms into it through the first of two arched openings in the wall.