Chekhov and the Contemporary Theatre

Chekhov and the Contemporary Theatre CLAYTON A. HUBBS In recent years we have seen a new appreciation of Chekhov's plays on the part of general audiences as well as students of drama. Directors have emphasized Chekhov's contemporary quality, and critics have attempted to define elements in his dramatic techniques that link him with Beckett, Pinter, and other contemporary playwrights. In this updating of Chekhov, the nature of his dramatic realism has been a subject ofincreasingly enlightened debate. Bernard Beckerman, in a recent article in Modern Drama on "The Artifice of 'Reality' in Chekhov and Pinter," begins with a summary of the two main sources of "reality" in the drama as a starting point for a discussion of Chekhov's contemporaneity. The first is "the impress of reality which comes from our habit ofrelating a play or a scene to some broader context." The second source of "reality," which Beckerman identifies with the theatre of Chekhov and Pinter, is the presentation itself, "the structure of the action scene by scene" the reality which the character on the stage projects in "recurrent activities," fixed routines. I Until recently, as Beckerman points out, the audiences at a Chekhov play -like his director Stanislavsky and the actors ofthe Moscow Art Theatre- seemed to respond only to the first source of"reality," the "ground" of the action and the apparent subject of the plays: the decay of old landed families, the aimlessness of all classes in society, the pathetic longings of the characters. Now, however, as Chekhov seems at last to be finding the right directors and audiences, with repeated exposure to his plays and those ofrecent playwrights whose techniques are similar, we have come more and more to differentiate the "'figures of action'" that control the structures of the plays from "the background of forlornness and decay."2 My purpose is to define the "real" ground of the action in Three Sisters and to consider the major implications, both thematic and technical, of the separation of figure and ground, and to do this in the context of the work of some contemporary dramatists - with a view to suggesting not only a new reading of Three Sisters CLAYTON A. HUBBS but a new perspective on the structures and themes of all of Chekhov's major plays. Beckerman's comparison of Chekhov and Pinter suggests some of the ways in which not only Pinter but other contemporary playwrights have prepared us to respond to Chekhov's nonnaturalistic techniques. The circumstances of a Chekhov play appear "familiar, almost trite," whereas with Pinter, Beckerman points out, we must seek "the context through the self-contained action of a sealed world."3 But the surface familiarity of Chekhov's worlds is deceptive. Like Pinter's rooms, the Chekhov estates comprise little worlds of their own, and the individuals within these worlds are to a great extent self-absorbed and self-contained. Their failure to connect with the larger world and with one another is the subject of the plays. The characters' separation from a stable point of reference and communion - the magic lake, mother Moscow, the cherry orchard - more than any other single factor accounts for the extreme pathos of Chekhov's plays and the patterns of repetition which constitute their structures.4 The desperate attachment to an imagined or remembered world which the characters obsessively attempt to rejoin in their repeated patterns of speech and action separates them from one another and from the emotional communion which Chekhov suggests is finally the only possible ground oftheir being. In their present isolation they cannot effectively respond to the others' repeated pleas for emotional sympathy. Despite their intense desire and attempts to find love and human understanding, in their ritualized routines they seem dulled to all but their own suffering and the unfulfilled desire to break out of their isolation. We know from the study of psychology - and our own experience - that the sense of separation, of isolation, is the major source of human anxiety. A modern audience, much more accustomed than the audience ofChekhov's time to a literature ofexistential despair and a "theatre ofthe absurd," responds to the situation of. a Chekhov play with considerably more...