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The Redgrave Outrage
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19734 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,507 Words |
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
I think it was Danny Kaye who used to tell the joke about preparing to act under Stanislavsky of the Moscow Arts Theatre. "Firrrst," he groaned, "I vas afrrraid I vas going to die. Then I vas afrraid I vasn't going to die."
The cliché of Russian drama as horribly sad has never quite died out. When The Three Sisters opened in London shortly before Christmas, at least three London critics were upset because they came to see it and did not shed tears. I hasten to add that the cliché is not just a Western misconception. Some years earlier, when the Moscow Arts Theatre brought a Chekhov play to London--The Cherry Orchard, which Chekhov called a comedy--the mood was somber, the pace was deliberate, and the acting was infused with enough late-dusk melancholia to please any depressive who cared to wallow in it.
It is true that The Three Sisters is called a "drama"; it is about three women whose hopes of love and a better life (symbolized by a return to Moscow where they once lived) are stifled in a mire of provincial existence and by the idle, petty cruelty of the people who surround them. A great deal happens that is very sad, but the play is not gloomy; it is intensely moving, because the spirit of these women survives their ordeal almost triumphantly, lifting the play at the very end on a last warm breath of vitality and hope.
Russian Porridge
Anyone who takes the trouble to read the Russian text can discover a quality that is nothing at all like a lump of boiled-down kasha, or Russian porridge. Indeed, the weight of the play depends upon a certain lightness and frivolity in the characters--an obvious fact missed by generations of directors and actors who pleased themselves (and drew sentimental tears from critics) by staging the play as an evening of glutinous theatrical tristesse.
Robert Sturua, who directed the London production, does not make this mistake. He is from Tbilisi, in the Georgian republic of the Soviet Union, and does not care for the gloomy Moscow approach to Chekhov. Actually, though Sturua is director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi, and has worked in Europe and even South America, it so happens that he never directed Chekhov before the English-language London production. (One reason for this is that Chekhov is not very popular in the non-Russian republics of the USSR.)
The new English text of The Three Sisters is a
...
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