Chekhov and the Contemporary Theatre

Abstract

In recent years we have seen a new appreciation of Chekhov's plays on the part of general audiences as well as students of drama. Directors have emphasized Chekhov's contemporary quality, and critics have attempted to define elements in his dramatic techniques that link him with Beckett, Pinter, and other contemporary playwrights. In this updating of Chekhov, the nature of his dramatic realism has been a subject of increasingly enlightened debate. Bernard Beckerman, in a recent article in Modern Drama on "The Artifice of 'Reality' in Chekhov and Pinter," begins with a summary of the two main sources of "reality" in the drama as a starting point for a discussion of Chekhov's contemporaneity. The first is "the impress of reality which comes from our habit of relating a play or a scene to some broader context." The second source of "reality," which Beckerman identifies with the theatre of Chekhov and Pinter, is the presentation itself, "the structure of the action scene by scene" — the reality which the character on the stage projects in "recurrent activities," fixed routines.