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Fin-de-siècle Reflections and Revisions: Wertenbaker Challenges British Chekhov Tradition in The Break of Day
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 41, Number 3, Fall 1998
- pp. 442-460
- 10.1353/mdr.1998.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Fin-de-siec1e Reflections and Revisions: Wertenbaker Challenges British Chekhov Tradition in The Break ofDay STUART YOUNG In two or three hundred years' lime, life on Ihis earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astonishing. Man needs such a life, .and even if it isn't here yet, he's still got to have a presentiment of it, to wait, and dream, and prepare for it [....J (Vershinin, in Three Sisters)] Heidi,·a lot of women are beginning to feel you can't have it all. Do you think it's time to compromise? (April, in The Heidi Chronicles):!. What's feminism for if we still hate each other? (Tess, in The Break ofDay)' Defending his presumption in rewriting "classic" plays, Howard Barker insists, "as you get older ... you achieve a certain parity with the artists of your culture. If you take your life as an artist with the utmost seriousness then I don't think you need feel an unnecessary humility towards the classics. You feel you have acquired the right to engage with them.'" Plays such as Edward Bond's Lear ('971) and The Woman ('978), Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and Caryl Churchill and David Lan's A Mouthful ofBirds ('986), a reworking of Euripides ' Bace/we, testify to the confidence and imagination with which modem British dramatists have ventured to revise or "mediate" classical texts. Although Shakespeare and the Greeks have been the most common sources of inspiration for such rewritings. more recently attention has turned to Chekhov. This is not surprising: not only does Chekhov reign supreme among foreign playwrights in Britain, easily overshadowing Moliere, Brecht, and even Ibsen, but he enjoys a place in the classical repertoire second only to Shakespeare's. Consequently, during the past forty years Chekhov's plays have been unriModem Drama, 40 ('997) 442 Wertenbaker's The Break of Day 443 valled in the number of translations or "adaptations" they have received. Those translators and adaptors include the playwrights Ann Jellicoe, Edward Bond, Christopher Hampton, Pam Gems, Michael Frayn, Trevor Griffiths, Thomas Kilroy, Mustapha Matura, Frank McGuinness and David Hare.5 It is perhaps not surprising that, more recently, British playwrights have also presumed to take greater licence in (re-)interpreting Chekhov's drama. Chekhov's first play, the cumbersome Platonov, has inspired two revisions, both of which were first staged by the National Theatre Company6 Michael Frayn reworked the allegedly unwieldy "mess" in the vein of his own comedy -farces as Wild Honey (1984).' Trevor Griffiths's more radical Piano (1990) might be seen as a riposte to Wild Honey and to the British tradition of Chekhov production exemplified by Frayn's canonical translations of Chekhov 's other plays. Griffiths ascribes to those plays a more progressive politics than the British theatre traditionally acknowledges. Consequently, whereas Wild Honey perpetuates the conventional understanding of Chekhov 's drama as tragic, fatalistic, and concerned only with "the workings of the human heart," Piano, like Griffiths's version of The Cherry Orchard, deliberately eschews "the elegiac or sentimental quality of British Chekhov production.,,8 Whereas Griffiths's argument is with the "class sectaries" who have appropriated Chekhov and so cauterised the politics of the plays,9 Howard Barker takes issue with the playwright and the plays themselves: "1 have a quarrel with Chekhov: a man who had an enormous influence on the English stage and who has to some extent institutionalised failure. ,,10 Barker's (Uncle) Vanya (1991 ) challenges the way in which Chekhov's play supposedly induces in the audience "an adoration of the broken will," thereby "making them collaborators in a cult of futility and impotence." Consequently, not only does Barker parenthesise "Uncle" and call him Ivan in the play, but he allows Vanya actually to succeed in shooting Serebryakov. Moreover, in Act Two Chekhov appears, attempting in vain to counter a rebellion by his characters. Although startling, Barker's reconception is weakened by its apparent failure to appreciate the metatheatrical dimension of the original Vanya's self-dramatising "performance" and, therefore, the way in which Chekhov's use of irony in fact subverts the "melancholy celebration of paralysis" which Barker imputes to the original play. I I The...