Production Of Chekhov Research Articles

Пьесы Чехова как основа метатеатральных спектаклей 2010-х годов

Chekhov’s drama has retained its constant popularity throughout the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century and has an unbroken scenic history. In modern theater it performs several functions: 1) of a literary basis for the-atrical action, carefully preserved by the director (traditionalist approach); 2) of a kind of material that can and should be adapted, modernized, adjusted to the urgent range of acute problems and to today’s scenic language (avant-garde, post-dramatic approach). One might argue that Chekhov’s drama transitions into the category of “proto-text” or “metatext”. Productions of Chekhov’s plays are often the ones that become the realm of the most radical theatrical experiments when their “familiar” “proto-text”, their basis and foundation are, so to speak, factored out from them: his drama remains in the domain of literature, of reader’s attention while the theater moves ahead – into the area of new scenic opportunities which are only tangentially

Experimental adaptation, technology, and performance in Vanya on the Plains

ABSTRACTElijah has a hard job. He’s a Content Moderator, coping with the technological divide that separates him from his family. To bridge the gap, he casts them in a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. But, putting on a play in the Plains proves a strange and difficult endeavor, since Theatre has been long forgotten. Part Chekhovian comedy, and part Absurdist futurism, Vanya on the Plains is a continuation of my work in intertextual, experimental adaptation. The play explores the erosion of embodied existence in relation to growing realms of digital content, evolving communications technologies, and environmental degradation.

Recepcii rossijskogo iskusstva v kul'ture YAponii

Japan is one of the most developed countries in the world. Cooperation with Japan is an important factor in the development of economic, political and cultural contacts of modern Russia. At the present time, we have all the conditions for cooperation and development of relations between these two countries. One of the main article’s tasks is to demonstrate how some historical aspects influenced the origin of Russian art adoption on the example of Russian literature, which serves as an impulse for further study of artistic culture spheres. New aspects of Russian culture’s interest in Japan result in study and translations of literature works such as the production of Chekhov’s plays on the Japanese theater stage, the adaptation of the works of F. M. Dostoevsky by a film director A. Kurosawa. The appeal to historical sources and literary works, visits to Japanese scholar’s seminars and the study of films led to the attempts to adopt Russian art to the modern, up-to-date requirements of Japanese culture. One of the most striking examples proving this trend is the creation of the instrument matryomin by the Japanese musician Masami Takeuchi. This instrument consists of the theremin, which is embedded in the case of the Russian doll Matryoshka. The topic of adoption study, its relevance, is repeatedly confirmed by such facts as the conferencing (on the territory of Russia and Japan), which Japanese Rusists, students who come to Russia for exchange, studying Russian take part in, indicate the attitude and perception of Russian art. These aspects allow us to assume the further development of the adoption of Russian art in Japan in much more new spheres.

Literary criticism, theatre theory and the director’s task: Katie Mitchell’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull

This article looks at how Chekhov’s play The Seagull thematises the challenges of translating and directing theatre texts, focusing specifically on Katie Mitchell’s 2006 production of Martin Crimp’s version of the play. It suggests that literary criticism remains an important tool for theorising theatre texts and performance. By focusing on the frictions between analysis of the text as language and approaches that equally emphasise the visual, the embodied and the performative, we can develop interesting theoretical perspectives on the relationship between words as material to be read, and the broader functions of the words of theatre texts in performance. In this case in particular, the article works through some of the challenges and choices a director like Katie Mitchell faces when converting a passion for literature, via a play that reflects theoretically on the relationship between writing, acting and directing, into performance.

The Chekhovian Point of View in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Although Virginia Woolf’s critical writings pay special tribute to Anton Chekhov’s stories and plays, his role as preceptor in relation to her own fiction has not been fully explored. Not only does the manuscript of To the Lighthouse display clear affinities with Chekhov’s sensibility (as apprehended in Woolf’s 1925 Common Reader essay, “The Russian Point of View”), but this congruence was intensified during extensive final revisions, begun in typescript just after Woolf had viewed a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in late October 1925. Woolf’s purposeful assimilation of Chekhov’s inconclusive, disjunctive manner in her meticulously composed, autobiographically candid novel bespeaks an unapologetic openness to authorial influence, made all the more provocative by the adoption of a foreign model whose merit was then still little recognized in English literary circles.

Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience: Reflexive Dramaturgies and Classic Texts

Discussing stage adaptations of Dostoevsky's The Idiot by Frank Castorf and Katie Mitchell as well as Chris Goode's unconventional production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, this essay explores new strategies in contemporary European theatre which are described here as 'reflexive dramaturgy'. This concept extends Hans-Thies Lehmann's influential modelling of postdramatic theatre and introduces Slavoj Ziz7caron;ek's notion of the 'parallax view' in order to shift the terms of reference away from power structures (and struggles) between the (written) text and other theatre signs. Instead, a focus on inscribed spectatorial perspectives is proposed in order to chart a more productive analytic framework specifically for contemporary productions of canonical texts. It is argued that reflexive dramaturgies reinforce rather than close the inherent gap between 'drama' (plot, narrative, and representation) and 'performance' (medium, experience, and presence). Being offered oscillating frames, perspectives and entry points, the audience is engaged in a 'parallax' encounter with classic texts and performative embodiments of these texts' own materiality (instead of mere representations of their plots). Since a coherent closure of the parallax is prevented, spectators are reflexively confronted with their own complicity in the very act of representation that underpins today's totalizing media society. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

Chekhov 2004. Chekhov Special Issues in Two Volumes. Volume 1: Aspects of Chekhov by Joe Andrew , Robert Reid Chekhov 2004. Chekhov Special Issues in Two Volumes. Volume 2: Chekhov and Others by Joe Andrew , Robert Reid (review)

REVIEWS 711 absence or separateness of Russian history. And even stereotypes change colour over the period, becoming more or less essentialist depending on the surrounding frame of reference. It isnot fornothing that the book aptly ends with a discussion of Saltykov's equivocal assessment ofWestern Europe, as Offord draws a rich and nuanced picture of a complex and ambiguous relationship, which continues to haunt Russia to thisday. Scrupulously researched and eminently readable (in some cases more so than its sources), enhanced, furthermore,with helpful historical and biograph ical backgrounders, this study should attract the interestof both specialists and the general public. Through this idiosyncratic lens, itoffersan invaluable view onto the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Russia. School ofLanguages,LinguisticsandFilm Andreas Schonle Queen Mary, UniversityofLondon Andrew, Joe and Reid, Robert (eds). Chekhov2004. ChekhovSpecial Issues in Two Volumes.Volume 1:Aspects ofChekhov.Essays in Poetics, 30. EIP (EIP Publications No. 10),Keele, Autumn 2005. [x] + v + 253 pp. Notes. ?24.00 (paperback). Andrew, Joe and Reid, Robert (eds). Chekhov2004. ChekhovSpecial Issues in Two Volumes.Volume2: Chekhovand Others.Essays inPoetics, 31. EIP (EIP Publications No. 11),Keele, Autumn 2006. [x] + vi + 368 pp. Notes. ?24.00 (paperback). The thirty-three essays in this two-volume edition derive from papers read at two conferences held inOxford in September 2004 ? 'One Hundred Years of Chekhov' and 'Chekhov's Legacy inRussian Culture of the 20th Century and Beyond'. As the editors note in their brief prefaces, the topics range widely from close readings of individual short stories to analysis ofChekhov's drama as text, performance and film adaptation. The second volume con siders Chekhov in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries, and the appropriation of his legacy both in Russia and beyond. The disparate articles in this loosely-linked collection are held together by one common thread ? the art of Anton Chekhov. As with many miscellanies, the individual items vary in style and content from thepedestrian and predictable to the stimulating and original. In the first volume there are several useful and thoughtfulpieces. Thus, Andrzej Dudek offers a wide-ranging discussion of themotif of insanity inChekhov's works, Wolf Schmid demonstrates the ambiguity of 'change' at the end of 'Dama s sobachkoi' and 'Nevesta', and Laurence Senelick evaluates various produc tions of Chekhov's plays, while observing that, 'in the English-speaking theatre, dramatists remote from Chekhov's sensibility, language and concerns, such as Pam Gems, Edward Bond, David Mamet, Trevor Griffiths, Peter Barnes, Lanford Wilson, David Hare, Brian Friel, and Richard Nelson, warp him into new shapes which express their own preoccupations' (p. 174). Birgit Beumers maintains that Vishnevyi sad isprimarily a 'vaudeville' (p. 24), in which the characters 'play a game, deliberately avoiding reality and turning 712 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 their lives into litde performances' (p. 29). This interesting article makes no mention, however, of themore profound and universal aspects of Vishnevyisad, which have been subdy illuminated by such scholars as Mikhail Gromov, Boris Zingerman and Emma Polotskaia. Cynthia Marsh meditates discern inglyon the theme of'the deceptive comfort of time' (p. in) inTri sestry, and claims that, at the end of the play, the immobility and words of the sisters 'suggest that there is a horrifyingbleakness, invulnerable to time, at the heart of human life' (p. in). Itmight perhaps be claimed with at least equal justifi cation that the end ofTri sestry suggests that, at the heart of human life, there is an indomitability and hopefulness? Perhaps the twomost memorable and heartfelt articles in the firstvolume are those by Harai Golomb and Richard Peace. Peace provides a sensitive analysis of 'SkripkaRotshiTda', inwhich perhaps the crucial ubytokis 'the loss of a loved child, the loss of past happiness' (p. 136). 'Thus, from the story's tide to itsending, thenarrative twists its way through inversions of stereotypes, reversals of character, personality and theme, but it is the titlewhich sets this progress inmotion' (p. 138).Golomb writes at length about human degenera tion and diminishment, with special reference to Tri sestry, before arriving at an unexpectedly optimistic conclusion: 'And indeed, people who want, who aspire, who aim high; even people who feel the need, albeit a futile one, to talk and think about aiming...

Coercive Somatographies: X-rays, Hypnosis, and Stanislavsky's Production Plan forThe Seagull

This article explores points of contact between Stanislavsky's detailed 1898 mise en scène for the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Chekhov's The Seagull, on the one hand, and discursive practices – specifically X-ray photography and hypnosis – striving to map the vaguely perceptible interior spaces of bodies upon their visible surfaces, on the other. For each of these discourses, this act of mapping was dependant upon the work of an interpreting authority – the stage director, master hypnotist, or clinician – who penetrated, arrested, and forcefully rearticulated the meanings of the body's interior. The bodies of The Seagull's actors thus vividly conveyed not their own psychic material but that belonging to Stanislavsky, the intervening master interpreter. In this, they joined hypnotized hysterics and X-rayed patients in presenting a referential psychosomatic palimpsest, displaying at once a perceptible surface and a safely reordered and coercively reinscribed interior.

Coercive Somatographies: X-rays, Hypnosis, and Stanislavsky's Production Plan for <i>The Seagull</i>

This article explores points of contact between Stanislavsky's detailed 1898 mise en scène for the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Chekhov's The Seagull, on the one hand, and discursive practices – specifically X-ray photography and hypnosis – striving to map the vaguely perceptible interior spaces of bodies upon their visible surfaces, on the other. For each of these discourses, this act of mapping was dependant upon the work of an interpreting authority – the stage director, master hypnotist, or clinician – who penetrated, arrested, and forcefully rearticulated the meanings of the body's interior. The bodies of The Seagull's actors thus vividly conveyed not their own psychic material but that belonging to Stanislavsky, the intervening master interpreter. In this, they joined hypnotized hysterics and X-rayed patients in presenting a referential psychosomatic palimpsest, displaying at once a perceptible surface and a safely reordered and coercively reinscribed interior.

Stanislavsky's Production Score for Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904): A Synoptic Overview

In many ways, the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was the most problematic and contentious of all its efforts to stage his plays. Events surrounding the composition of the play and its staging were not propitious. Chekhov wrote it over a prolonged period during which he was an increasingly sick man; the premiere, in January 1904. was closely followed by the dramatist's death in July. What is more, Chekhov's dissatisfaction with the production was couched in terms of frustration and anger unlike anything to be found elsewhere in his correspondence. The extent to which these sentiments can be attributed to his illness, rather than to real inadequacies in the interpretation, compounds the difficulties that the play and the production jointly present.

Space, Genre, and Methodology in Max Stafford-Clark's Touring Production of Chekhov's ‘Three Sisters’

It is received theatrical wisdom – indeed, a self-evident truth – that performances of a particular production differ not only night by night, depending on the chemistry between actors and audience, but in the case of touring productions, in response to the changing relationship between the driector's approach and the venue for which it must be freshly adapted. Yet studies of the theoretical or practical effects of such differences are rare – and can rarely draw on such a range of performing venues as those in which the Out of Joint company presented Max Stafford-Clark's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters in 1995. Originally staged at the ornate, tradition-steeped Bristol Old Vic, the production was taken on tour to modernist, hangar-like auditoria in India, and presented in the unusual yet apt ‘found’ environment of an English country house, before reaching its final home at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with its renovated Victorian interior surrounded by a modernist shell. Exploring the terminology used by lain Mackintosh in his Architecture, Actor, and Audience, Sylvia Vickers compares and contrasts the conception, realization, and reception of the production in these varying venues. Sylvia Vickers worked as an actress in a wide range of theatre before co-founding and creating the Brighton Actors' Workshop and Studio Twelve in the 'seventies. She then took a first in English at Sussex, and now teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute while continuing her work as a director, most recently for the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.

‘Thinking with Chekhov’: the Evidence of Stanislavsky's Notebooks

In the second and third volumes of the Russian edition of Stanislavsky's notebooks, Rezhisserskie Egzemplary (Moscow, 1981 and 1983), are to be found Stanislavsky's own notes on his productions of Chekhov's plays for the Moscow Art Theatre – The Seagull, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Questioning the received wisdom that in many ways his first director served Chekhov ill, with over-elaborate productions which failed to bring out the humour and ambiguity of the plays, Jovan Hristić here draws deeply upon the notebooks to contrast their instructions and descriptions with the directions and stated or presumed intentions of Chekhov himself. He illuminatingly reveals that, while some of Stanislavsky's solutions understandably appear over-the-top to more minimalist modern tastes, they are almost invariably complementary rather than contradictory to Chekhov, and designed to serve the plays rather than to subject them to directorial whim.

Chekhov on the British Stage

List of illustrations List of contributors Note on style and abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Chekhov on the British stage: differences 3. The 'inevitability' of Chekhov: Anglo-Russian theatrical contacts in the 1910s 4. Chekhov, naturalism and the drama of dissent: productions of Chekhov's plays in Britain before 1914 5. Bernard Shaw's dialogue with Chekhov 6. Coping with the outlandish: the English response to Chekhov's plays 1911-1926 7. Komisarjevsky's 1926 Three Sisters 8. Peggy Ashcroft and Chekhov 9. Far from the West End: Chekhov and the Welsh language stage 1924-1991 10. Chekhov re-viewed: the Moscow Art Theatre's visits to Britain in 1958, 1964 and 1970 11. A path to Chekhov 12. Subsequent performances: Chekhov 13. The 'dwindling scale': the politics of British Chekhov 14. The Cherry Orchard: a new English version by Trevor Griffiths 15. Changes of direction: Mike Alfred's methods with Chekhov 16. Chekhov and the company problem in the British theatre 17. Design for Chekhov 18. My search for standards as a translator of Chekhov's plays 19. Chekhov into English: the case of The Seagull 20. English translations of Chekhov's plays: a Russian view 21. Appendix: A chronology of British professional productions of Chekhov's plays 1909-1991 Index.

Exploring the Limitless Depths: Mike Alfreds Directs Chekhov

‘Deadly British productions of Chekhov remain all too common.’ Or so suggests David Allen, who finds in the Chekhov productions of Mike Alfreds a refreshing recognition of the distinctively ‘Russian’ qualities of the plays, and an ability to render these in terms of the choices available to British actors. Mike Alfreds founded the Shared Experience company in 1975, and in Theatre Quarterly No. 39 (1981). Clive Barker interviewed him and members of the company on the processes of collective creation through which most of their productions then evolved: the present feature thus in part reflects Alfreds's own developing interest in working on ‘fixed’ scripts, both with Shared Experience, for whom he directed Three Sisters earlier this year, and in his work as guest director of The Cherry Orchard, first for Oxford Playhouse in 1982, and subsequently for the National Theatre at the Cottesloe, in 1985. In the following interview, Mike Alfreds's own perceptions of his work are intercut with author David Allen's observations during rehearsals, and the subsequent reactions of the critics.

Andrei Serban Directs Chekhov: The Sea Gull in New York and Japan

During the summer of 1980, Andrei Serban was invited to Japan by Keita Asari to direct The Sea Gull for the Shiki Theater Company of Tokyo. In the fall he returned to the United States and directed a second, and quite different production of Chekhov's play for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater in New York. Serban talks about Chekhov and the two stagings in the following interview, which took place in New York City on April 2, 1981.