Consequently, the two greatest directors of this period turned to the farces when they directed Chekhov. Vakhtangov prepared an evening of one-acts, The Wedding, The Jubilee, and a dramatisation of the short story 'Thieves' for the Moscow Art Theatre Third Studio in 1920, reviving them at his own theatre the next year. His work began with the question, 'How are we going to portray Chekhov's characters, are we to defend them or condemn them?' Essentially, he chose the latter course, and, in The Wedding, the characters were portrayed as a collection of vulgar grotesques. Only the 'General' contributed warmth and cheer, and when he rushed out crying 'Chelove-e-ek! Chelove-e-ek!' (both 'Man' and 'Waiter!') the audience was so shattered it could not applaud. The author's nephew Michael Chekhov who had guffawed throughout could, at this final curtain, whisper only 'What a horror! What a horror!'4
Vsevolod Meyerhold as a tyro director had staged facsimiles of the Moscow Art Theatre productions in the provinces and did not return to Chekhov until 1935, the 75th anniversary of the playwright's birth. Then he presented three farces, The Jubilee, The Bear, and The Proposal, under the collective title 33 Swoons, computed by Meyerhold to be the number of fainting-fits that occur in the plays. To the cast, he announced that these swoons constituted the leit-motivs of the performance, a series of theatrical games; to the world at large, he proclaimed that the swoons exemplified the neurasthenic legacy of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia. Overcharged with innumerable props, complicated pantomime and sight gags, the vaudevilles proved broadly funny at times, but were condemned by critics for directorial exhibitionism and heavy-handedness.
The first important re-interpretation of Chekhov in Russia came from Nemirovich-Danchenko. Directing a Cherry Orchard in Milan (1933) with an Italian troupe headed by the emigree actress Tatiana Pavlova, Nemirovich was able to discard some Moscow Art Theatre traditions and bring Ranevskaya and Trofimov closer to what he believed had been Chekhov's intention. Returning to Russia, he set about to revitalise Three Sisters, whose characters he saw not as futile and trivial, but as fine minds 'longing for life,' fit to be acted in a style of 'virile strength.'5 Everything from uniforms to dressing-gowns was made beautiful, everything cold or degrading was eliminated. The sisters became a musical trio, set off against the raucous Natasha (Stanislavsky's wife Lilina had played Natasha as sickly sweet; here A. Georgievskaya made her a monster of crassness). The final hymn to the future was performed without Chebutykin's ironic counterpoint.
The French director, Michel Saint-Denis, who saw this 'affirmative' revision in 1940, remarked
It was a production of a very high standard, but it was Chekhov simplified both in style and meaning. The simplification of the out-of-door set for the last act was welcome but lacked unity. The play had been speeded up in tempo . . . The poetic values had been damaged in favour of a more optimistic, more clearly constructive meaning. Nostalgic melancholy, even despair, had given way to positive declarations.6
Chekhov underwent another eclipse in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War, and not until 1944 did The Seagull receive an innovative production. Aleksandr Tairov, the waning director of the Kamerny (Chamber) Theatre, staged it as a concert reading, with a sound Marxist line that man's capability could overcome all obstacles through belief in his own potential. Nina, played by his wife Alisa Koonen, thus became the leading character.
A more influential breakthrough was made by Georgy Tovstonogov's Three Sisters at the Bolshoy Dramatic Theatre in Leningrad (1965), which found a way to bring out the play's contemporaneity without discarding the
Moscow Art Theatre model entirely. His designer, S. Iunovich, kept to a black-white-grey palette and provided stage islands which jutted out into the audience to create the theatrical equivalent of the 'close-up' for a public brought up on movies. The tone of the production was epic, showing the wind of history blowing through the characters' lives, their hopes shattered by the passage of time.
The enfant terrible of Russian Chekhov directors has been Anatoly Efros, who stirred up a terrific controversy in 1966 with his The Seagull at the Lenin-Komsomol Theatre in Moscow. It emphasised two typical post-war themes: idealistic youth having to compromise with adult life, and the incompatibility of talent with fakery. V. Smirnitsky's Treplyov was active, restless and childlike, the nexus of the play; while the rest of the characters, adrift and frustrated, were nasty to each other in a vicious, strident manner. This note was struck more loudly in Efros's Three Sisters (Malaya Bronnaya Theatre, Moscow, 1967), a staging without half-tones: every petty grievance exploded into a loud quarrel or scandal. Motivation was, as a rule, sexuaclass="underline" Natasha had needs which frigid Andrey could not meet, so she was justified in taking a lover; Irina was a capricious demi-vierge, Masha a coarse predator, Olga repressed and repressive. Efros came back to Chekhov in 1975 with an iconoclastic The Cherry Orchard (Taganka, Moscow): the unit set suggested a graveyard hemmed in by billowing window-curtains and family portraits. The characters were seen as highstrung neurotics, an increasingly popular notion with contemporary Soviet directors.
This tendency came to a head in the Taganka's Three Sisters directed by Yury Lyubimov. The play began by sliding open a wall of the theatre to reveal a military band and the Moscow street outside the building; when closed, the wall's mirrored surface threw the audience's image back in its face. This opening statement more than hinted that the sisters' plight was a contemporary one with existential overtones. The characters, isolated from one another, wandered desolately about until they banged into the sheet-metal wall engraved with iconic figures. Such extreme re-interpretations of Chekhov were meaningful when set against the Moscow Art Theatre tradition. Russian critics and spectators could savour and analyse the divagation from the orthodox renditions. Most often, they would condemn it as wilfully perverse; occasionally, they would welcome a new revelation of meaning.
A recent adaptation of Chekhov's themes to modern Soviet life is Vladimir Arro's Look Who's Come (1982), in which a famous writer's widow resolves to sell his dacha to a troika of vulgarians: a hairdresser, a bartender and a bathhouse attendant. Despite good reviews and responsive audiences, the government forced the author to alter the ending: the suicide of a dacha resident was replaced by the deus ex machina of a phone call, cancelling the sale. Soviet censorship prefers its Chekhovs to deal in happy endings.
In the English-speaking world, Chekhov's acceptance was not immediate, though now he has attained the status of a classic: no respectable repertory theatre considers itself fully fledged until it has tested itself in one of his four masterpieces. During the course of this assimilation, Chekhov received some enduring and often misleading interpretations. First taken to be a purveyor of gloom and doom, he has, as Spencer Golub notes, 'been ennobled by age ... He is as soothing and reassuring as the useless valerian drops dispensed by the doctors in his plays ... an article of faith, like all stereotypes . . . the Santa Claus of dramatic literature . . .'7 How this falsely benign image took shape is worth examining.