British productions got off to a good start with The
Seagull at the Glasgow Repertory Theatre (November 1908). Its translator and director, the knowledgeable George Calderon, declared that 'a play of Tchekhof is a reverie, not a concatenation of events'; insistent that Chekhov's plays went beyond mere naturalism, he stressed what reviewers deemed the play's 'Ibsenite symbolism'.8 He also compensated for British actors' inability to maintain an inner life when not speaking lines, by stressing the transitions between group mood and individual reactions. The result was impressive.
Unfortunately, the first London Chekhov was less propitious. Its sponsor, George Bernard Shaw, characterised the Stage Society Cherry Orchard (1911) as 'the most important [opening] in England since that of A Doll's House'.9 But the Stage Society was primed for social messages and dramas of reform; it and its public were baffled by the characters' self-involvement and assumed that the play was an emanation of some mythical Slavic soul. They judged it against the standard of the well-made problem play, and took Lopakhin to be a brutish villain, the Gayev family charming victims and Yepikhodov as the 'raisonneur'. Shaw felt compelled to adopt the Chekhovian ethos to his own messianic ends in Heartbreak House (1919). It was not until after the Great War that British audiences discovered a rapport with Chekhov.
The mood of embittered disillusionment that followed the War suddenly made the yearnings and fecklessness of Chekhov's people seem apposite, at the same time that the literary avant-garde was popularising his stories. His plays were greeted as contemporary dejection in Russian dress. Another agent in this naturalisation process was the emigre director Theodore Komisarjevsky (Fyodor Kommissar- zhevsky) who mounted a series of Chekhov productions between 1925 and 1936, far better integrated and skilfully acted than any previously seen. They employed winning young players such as John Gielgud, Charles Laughton, Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft, with whom audiences could empathise. Komisarjevsky had no qualms about cutting the plays and skewing them to bring out the more mawkish aspects. Gielgud relates of the 1926 Three Sisters (Barnes Theatre):
The play was dressed in 1880s costumes, and Tusenbach, shorn of his lines about his ugliness, was played (by Komisarjevsky's express direction) as a romantic juvenile . . . When I questioned him about the 'ugly' lines being cut, he shrugged his expressive shoulders and said, 'My dear boy, the English public always demand a love interest.'10
These productions promoted in the English mind an image of Chekhov as pastel-coloured, moonstruck and sentimental. Epigones like Rodney Ackland and N. C. Hunter in their plays tried to transplant the seemingly fragile exotic to a familiar landscape of Bloomsbury boarding-houses and Dorset manors, with only partial success. Still, for the actor, Gielgud recalled, 'playing Chekhov in the twenties and thirties was to us like discovering a new form . .
The actor-oriented productions of this period culminated in Tyrone Guthrie's The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic with Laughton as Lopakhin and Athene Seyler as Ranevskaya (1933); and a Three Sisters (Queen's Theatre, 1938), directed by Michel Saint-Denis, founder of the Compagnie des Quinze. Its superb cast, including Michael Redgrave as Tusenbach, was recollected by many as one of the most perfect examples of teamwork ever seen on the London stage. Given eight weeks to rehearse instead of the usual four, the actors were able to live into their roles to a remarkable degree: for the first time, an English audience was seeing an indigenous company approximate the Moscow Art Theatre.
Laurence Olivier played Astrov in a respected Uncle Vanya at the New Theatre in 1945, with Ralph Richardson in the title part; he returned to the role in 1962 at the Chichester Festival, this time yoked with Redgrave. The most original aspect of the production was its use of a unit set for all the acts. This made sense economically and technically, but played hob with Chekhov's symbolic progress from exterior to interior.
The average English Chekhovian production had become a stereotype, the languorous maundering of trivial people that Peter Ustinov parodied in The Love of Four Colonels, with army officers knitting in swings and non sequitur conversations stalling over unpronounceable names. Critics began to complain of the self-pity and the slow motion, that, in the words of one, supplied 'an invisible hassock for the reverential.'12 Clearly, a fresh approach was called for. But British theatre kept the Komisarjevsky pattern well into the 1970s, relying more on strong individual performances than on a directorial overview.
New attitudes began to surface in Lindsay Anderson's Seagull (1975) which went overboard in its search for farce, and in the work of Jonathan Miller. As a physician, Miller shared Chekhov's clinical acumen, and in his Seagull (Chichester, 1974) he presented a nosology of the characters' symptoms. Treplyov's Oedipal complex was anatomised to a fare-thee-well, aided by Irene Worth's crooning a lullaby as she bandaged his head; and, in the last act, Sorin exhibited the effects of his stroke in his thickened speech. Miller's Three Sisters (Cambridge Theatre, 1976) undercut the usual romantic sympathy for the threesome, in an attempt to work against idees regus about Chekhov.
A similar repudiation of the popular image was to be seen in The Cherry Orchard adapted by Trevor Griffiths, a playwright of socialist leanings (Nottingham, 1977), which dwelt on the social inequities among the characters and invested all its positive significance in Lopakhin as it dwelt on the social inequities among the characters. A more radical endeavour was Thomas Kilroy's transference of the action of The Seagull to fin-de-siecle Ireland (Royal Court Theatre, 1981). For many British playgoers, the social equation made great sense and brought the characters more clearly into focus. It also pointed up the jokes: when the Arkadina figure, Isobel Desmond, responded to her son's play by exclaiming, 'Good Lord, it's one of those Celtic things,' it brought down the house.
Chekhov was barely known on the American stage before the Moscow Art Theatre arrived on its tours of 1923-24, with a repertory including Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Ivanov, in many cases with the actors who had originally created the roles. Although the Moscow Art Theatre itself regarded these productions as outmoded, they were eye-opening to American actors and playgoers. Despite the incomprehensible Russian dialogue, they were struck by the ensemble playing and the extra dimension Chekhov assumed when realised so thoroughly in every detail.
The earliest results of this epiphany could be seen in the work of Eva Le Gallienne for the Civic Repertory Theatre (1926-1933). The ambitions of Le Gallienne, an actress of wide culture and taste, usually outstripped her capabilities, for although she tried to emulate the Moscow Art Theatre's stage pictures and deliberate rhythms, her casts were mediocre (with the exception of Alia Nazimova as an incandescent Ranevskaya); her productions were admirable more for good intentions than for exciting theatrics.