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122 REVIEWS turgy. characterization, language, stage time, smells, musical form, and sound effects. Chekhov's clear maturation as a playwright from The Seagull to The Cherry Orchard seems to parallel Rayfield's own increasingly sophisticated and useful critical analysis. Rayfield and Chekhov peak together in The Cherry Orchard as a culmination of all that has gone before. The book includes a select bibliography and an index. An 1896 caricature of Chekhov riding a seagull while being fired upon by critics graces the cover of the paperback . That and a manuscript page from The Cherry Orchard are its only illustrations . DAVID ALLEN. Performing Chekhov. London: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xii + 263. $24.99 (Pb). Reviewed by Laurence Senelick, Tufts University When he reviewed my book The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance (1997) for New Theatre Quarterly, David Allen called it "a rich resource, and a stimulus to further investigations" (396). Evidently on his mind was his own work in progress, for he has drawn on that resource heavily for his book Pel/arming Chekhov, which I am now reviewing in tum. Such is the plight of specialists in a circumscribed field, who, like Mark Twain's Sandwich Islanders, "make a living by taking in one another's washing." According to the blurb on the back cover, Pel/arming Chekhov is "a unique guide to Chekhov's plays in performance." Blurb-writers are not under oath. Allen himself is mOte sensitive to what Harold Bloom might call "the anxiety of influence"; he states in his preface that his "book is not a complete historical survey of Chekhov on the stage; instead, I have chosen to focus on a number of significant, and often controversial productions, which I feel crystallise some of the key issues and debates about performing Chekhov" (xi). Limiting his itinerary to Russia, the U.K., and the U.S., Allen travels a path that has already been well blazed. This enables him to pause at certain rest stops for longer periods than his precursors could manage and to botanize at leisure, but both trajectory and scenery are pretty familiar. The more-than-twice-told tale of Chekhov's revelation to the world by Stanislavsky is told yet again. Allen, who reads Russian, quotes extensively from the director's "scores" but doesn't always recognize the difference between what was prescribed and what was actually seen by the audience. He makes the mistake, common to novices in Russian research, of lending credence to whatever has appeared in print. quoting reviewers and practitioners without examining their biases and blind spots. For instance, Allen takes me to task for saying that Leonidov, who created the role of Lopakhin, was a "second-rater." How could this be, Allen asks, since he had played Vershinin Reviews 123 in Three Sisters? Actually, Leonidov played Solyony, not at the premiere but two years after Chekhov died; neither his colleagues nor the critics considered him an outstanding talent until 1910, when he created Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov. A member of the Art Theatre for barely a year when cast as Lopakhin, Leonidov was "second-rate" compared to Stanislavsky, whom Chekhov wanted for the role. Allen's only evidence to counter Chekhov's statements about Leonidov's inferiority is testimony from the actor himself, made after Chekhov's death and at a time when members of the Moscow Art Theatre were being canonized by the Soviet establishment. No statement made in a Russian publication of that period can be taken as gospe\. Allen touches on Vakhtangov's and Meyerhold's productions ofChekhov's farces (which don't connect with the book's focus on the four major plays) and then sums up Russia with the eccentric interpretations of Efros and Lyubimov . This gives a somewhat uneven picture of the debates over Chekhovian performance that raged from the very first, for the sociopolitical, aesthetic, and even theatrical contexts are sketched in vaguely or not at all. It could be argued, as many Russians do, that Nemirovich-Danchenko's Three Sisters of 1940 was a real turning point: Allen dismisses it as an "ideological reduction and distortion" (88), something that could also be said of Lyubimov...

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