Chekhov Translated: Shaw's Use of Sound Effects in Heartbreak House

Chekhov Translated: Shaw's Use of Sound Effects in Heartbreak Housel MIRIAM HANDLEY Critics familiar with readings of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard will recognise the significance placed upon the play's sound effects. Writing of the "enigmatic'" breaking string heard in Act Two and Act Four of Chekhov's play, J.L. Styan famously noted, "to interpret the sound is to interpret the play."3 Still earlier in the play's perfonnance history, Vsevolod Meyerhold wrote to Chekhov, "the producer must first understand [The Cherry Orchard) with his hearing."4 In this article 1 want to argue that Shaw, too, recognised the importance of sound as a method of communicating the meaning of The Cherry Orchard. By looking at Shaw's play Heartbreak House (first published '919; frrst perfonned 1921), sub-titled A Falltasia in the Russian ManneI ' on English Themes, I will show how and why Shaw used sound effects to translate and interpret The Cherry Orchard for a British audience. Shaw's championing of Chekhov's work has been interpreted as instrumental in bringing The Cherry Orchard before the Stage Society audience in London in 1911.5 As early as ' 905, Shaw had written to Laurence Irving in an attempt to discover more about Chekhov's plays. He wrote, "I hear there are several dramas extant by Whatshisname (Tchekhoff [sic], or something like that) ... Have you any of them translated for the Stage Society?,,6 A year after the first London production of The Cherry Orchard, George Calderon, one of the first to publish a translation of Chekhov's plays, reiterated the connection perceived to exist between Shaw and Chekhov. Calderon described his preface to the translations as an attempt to help the reader "clear his eyes, to make his vision 'nonnal,' like the unassuming Irishman."7 This reference to "'nOTmal ' eyesight" recalls Shaw's description of his own gift of dramatic explanation in the preface to Plays Unpleasant (1898) and indicates that Calderon was applying a Shavian process of interpretation to Chekhov's playss A few years later, another translator, Julius West, cited Shaw's praise of Chekhov as a means of confrrming the Russian playwright's place among the dramatists of Modern Drama, 42 (Winter 1999) 565 566 MIRIAM HANDLEY "the Dew theatre." He wrote, "Mr Bernard Shaw has several times remarked: 'Every time I see a play by Chekhov. I want to chuck all my own stuff into the flre. "'9 Although Shaw thought that "Everything we write in England seems sawdust after Tchekhov [sic] ..... his perception of the playwright's importance was not immediately shared either by the Stage Society or by British reviewers attending the J 9I J production. As critics such as Jan McDonald. Stephen Ie Fleming and Laurence Senelick have suggested. The Cheny Orchard met with a bemused response when it was first performed.II The reviewer for the Times noted of the Stage Society production. "Russians are foreigners. but even so. it is highly improbable that they are such fools as they seem in the English version of Chekhov's comedy." The review continued. "[The Cherry Orchard] cannot but strike an English audience as something queer. outlandish , even funny."1 2Another review published in the Westminster Gazette concluded that the play was "a slice of life comedy. but the life was very foreign and the slice rather big."" To a great extent, the response of the Times and Westminster Gazette reviewers was anticipated by the Russian writer and critic D.S. Merezhkovsky . who threw doubt upon the efficacy of Chekhov's plays When translated for audiences outside Russia. He argued that Chekhov's works described "a dead point of Russian contemporaneity. without any connection with world history and world culture."" A review of George Calderon's carefully annotated translation of Chekhov's plays confirmed Merezhkovsky's view. Calderoo 's reviewer wrote, "Russian melancholy. futility ... helplessness ... is not a feeling which we share in Western Europe and the difference in temperament may well keep Chekhov from our affections."" Shaw's response to the first London production of The Cherry Orchard is set out in the preface to Heartbreak House. He wrote. "Tchekov's [sic] plays ... got no further in Englimd...