The Idea of a Definitive Production: Chekhov in and out of Period

Abstract

The first duty of director is to be loyal to his author. Or is it? It may be that this is of those golden rules to which lip service is paid too easily. Perhaps his first duty is to interpret author to audience, thus showing more responsible loyalty to both parties and doing the play real honor. Especially if the author is dead and the audience is alive, in another place, in another time, with another set of beliefs and traditions. Here is surely an issue for students of comparative drama: how are we to regard the notion of a production, phrase used not as pejorative but as praise? Michel Saint-Denis's production of Three Sisters for John Gielgud's company at the Queen's Theatre, in 1938 received, in the Stanislavsky tradition, eight weeks of rehearsal instead of the usual three or four, and was thought by Gielgud to be one of the most perfect examples of team-work ever presented in London 1 and by Laurence Olivier to have been the definitive production in English. 2 There is talk in similar terms about Olivier's British National Theatre production of Uncle Vanya, presented at Chichester in 1963 and transferred to the Old Vic in 1964. There were early assumptions of the same kind about the Chekhov productions of the Moscow Art Theatre. And no doubt each of us has his image of production of these plays. The issue becomes acute in the case of Chekhov, whose carefully ambivalent attitude to life as reflected in the major plays has regularly teased directors and audiences in this century. The teasing is especially brilliant in the last moments of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, while central characters in The Cherry Orchard, like Trofimov and Lopahin, seem deliberately to invite choice of readings. In the end Chekhov leaves the spectator's own insight to unify the disparate elements of his plays.