Chekhov In Performance

This is a hard book to engage critically. It’s a bit like the kitchen stove: something we all need and will use as long as it lasts, but not something to become dynamically involved with. The comparison is not meant to slight Senelick’s work, rather to suggest its genre. It’s a highly efficient, stylishly written cyclopedia: not a book to be read straight through or to change our critical lives, but there to be consulted and relied on ad hoc; in its own field indispensable.

For let it be said: this work is as thorough, perceptive, and clearly written an account of its subject as we are likely to be given for years, even though every year must outdate it. It isn’t complete: there’s little or nothing, for example, on Spain, Scandinavia, or English-speaking countries beyond the British Isles and the United States. But it doesn’t waste space; so that its 360 pages of discursive prose are tight enough to clinch the already probable case for selection. Senelick provides a paragraph or two—sometimes more, sometimes less—on production after production, many of them rareties, with little-known photos to match. It’s hard to imagine a set of more succinct yet descriptive readings. They’re so suggestively detailed that you sometimes wonder if all these productions can have been quite as distinct from one another as the writer makes them sound.

The author’s chief zones of engagement are Russia, Eastern Europe, the United States, and England. He’s specially powerful on the first two, and most thorough, appropriately enough, on early Russian stagings, although he’s no slave to the artistically overemphatic and politically underemphatic Stanislavsky. (An essay by Jovan Hristic in New Theatre Quarterly in 1995 argues that Stanislavsky’s notebooks should make us challenge the usual doctrine that his elaborate productions for the Moscow Art Theater were contradictory to Chekhov’s purposes.) Senelick is more overtly unfriendly to Lee Strasberg (and American Chekhov generally) than to Stanislavsky, showing that, in more senses than the obvious, the one was not the other. He refers to “the Galician-born guru’s” Three Sisters and Geraldine Page’s Olga, compared by one reviewer to Lear. This Olga was so discomfited by Natasha’s meanness that she vomited loudly into a basin—suggesting to Senelick “the Method equivalent of ‘fie! fie! fie! Pah! pah!’” He is rather too simply dismissive of “English Chekhov” (i.e., Chekhov in England), as if it were more or less always “constipated,” “genteel,” and the rest of it. But as a rule he manages to review productions in his own experience of forty-odd years of theatergoing with the same degree of detachment as those he cannot have witnessed himself. In fact the author’s uniform tone makes it generally hard to tell which performances he has seen and which he hasn’t: again an indication of the book’s genre.

Senelick gives due weight to Chekhov productions by Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, Komisarjevsky, Saint-Denis, Pitoëff, Tairov, Tovstonogov, Éfros, Krejca, Strehler, Vitez, Brook, Serban, and Stein. The author demonstrates that most of these directors, although inevitably responding to local cultural and/or political circumstances, were essentially sui generis, sometimes (especially among the Russians) reacting against their predecessors, but mostly developing independently the visions that have made their reputations. The book does not neglect directors with lesser names, or notable actors and theaters. And of course it’s always jostling the questions of whether a Chekhov play is funny or sad, words or music, culturally tied or mythically universal; and whether it should be staged “naturalistically” or more “theatrically,” with the consequent implications for mise-en-scène.

When Senelick comes to describe recent American productions of Chekhov, it’s clear that he’s drawing at least partly on personal experience, and here he announces his own view that good Chekhov acting is always ensemble acting. But that fails to allow for the solipsism of Chekhov’s characters. Thus the book’s analogy of “an orchestral piece to be interpreted by a conductor” doesn’t work so well for a play by Chekhov as it does for many others. More appropriate is the image rejected by Senelick, of “chamber music played by a group of virtuosi.” In fact even that analogy seems too kind to Chekhov’s characters, who are not so much virtuosi as soloists in need of tuning; their mode is dissonance, not orchestration. And as for actors, many would be unhappy with the role that Senelick assigns to “conductors” (i.e., directors) and their “concepts.” Most actors, of Chekhov at least, understandably prefer to explore individual character than try to embody a director’s abstract ideas. Senelick objects against one American production that “ideas were incorporated as they occurred in rehearsal. . . . The director’s major task appeared to be editing the actors’ choices.” But what’s wrong with that? Senelick complains that “acting problems” were here given priority over “textual interpretation.” But that doesn’t really make sense even as an issue, since the problems of acting Chekhov are bound to be rooted in the textual givens, however variously they may be interpreted.

Senelick himself has acted, studied, taught, written about, and translated Chekhov. But what makes the Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts a theater historian like no other is his slogging the extra mile in search of sources. It’s perhaps inevitable that a book so descriptive raises more critical questions than it has space to address. (The same author’s Anton Chekhov, his 1985 contribution to the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series, provides a sharp critical introduction to individual plays.) So, for example, we are prompted to wonder what it means for a production to be faithful (or not) to its textual origins. Senelick cites, evidently with approval, the critic Siegfried Melchinger’s recognition that “the notion of a production being ‘true’ to a work” is “a myth.” Yet there are surely degrees of fidelity; it’s not always simply a matter of true or false. Senelick himself likes David Mamet’s rendition of Three Sisters better than his Cherry Orchard, because it is “more respectful of the original”; and he is uniformly severe with “inaccurate” versions of Chekhov by those innocent of the Russian tongue.

Then again, there’s obviously more to translation than language. Senelick himself at one point acknowledges “the inevitable données that subliminally govern the transference of a play from one culture to another.” In general, however, this admission is belied by his complaints against non-Russian productions of Chekhov that they fail to understand, let alone represent, the playwright’s own social and historical context. (Senelick cites Peter Brook’s Cherry Orchard as particularly offensive in this respect.) But how is a Chekhov play to be translated from, say, Moscow in 1898 to New York City in 1998, from Russian (and Russian-speaking) actors to American ones? And how about varieties of accent? A Chekhov done in English in England probably has to represent Russian class divisions by English “equivalents,” however “misleading” they may sound to those familiar with the Russian scene. Or again: what about the “translation” from rehearsing a play four times, as in Moscow in 1887, to working on it for six months, as in Prague some eighty years later? (Senelick challengingly quotes the actor Laurance Rudic’s objection to an extended rehearsal period that it “exhaust[s] all the possibilities,” leading “to a rigid, repetitive type of performance, squeezed of all juice and any sense of interpretive danger.”)

Senelick’s timely and important book features three handy indexes, including a checklist of over five hundred productions between 1886 and 1995. It has its share of minor proofing errors, especially near the end and including the misspelling of Frayn all but once; but not many other slips that one reader could spot. William Hurt appeared as Ivanov not in a “university” production by the Yale Drama School (Senelick’s quotation marks), but in a performance by the Yale Rep, a full-fledged professional enterprise occasionally housed in the University Theatre. The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis is not built “in the round,” but more like two-thirds of it; it’s not the true arena theater that Professor Senelick must know so well from Tufts. And the leaves of act 2 of Waiting for Godot are newly sprouted, not fallen. Hope for a comic Cherry Orchard after all?