Word: checkhov
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Heartbreak House has no plot, and its wit flashes, as its farce pops, only intermittently. Shaw's characters are too idiosyncratic for Heartbreak House to be, as he intended it, "cultured, leisured England before the war." But the form of Checkhov and the style and content of Shaw combine in a haunting semi-darkness that retains its excitement when the hard bright light of ordinary Shaw tires the mind's eye. Its primary quality is this atmosphere, which requires exactly the sort of orchestration of every element that Mr. Clurman has notably failed to provide...
...work of Anton Checkhov, saintlike Russian reformer, "The Three Sisters" was first performed by Stanislavsky in Moscow in February, 1901. The play itself is a beautifully executed bit of national portraiture as well as a discriminating study of individual frustration. Each of the three Prozorov sisters, living in a provincial Russian town of the last century, suffers from disappointment and disillusion. Masha, wed to an absurd pedagogue, finds, only to lose, her true love, Colonel Vershmin; Olga the eldest, is doomed to spend the dreary minutes of her existence as a high-school superintendent; and Irina, the youngest, hating...
...appearance, in his diction, in his facial expressions--Bon-Aim first and last, looks, acts, and is the Slav; he seems to have stepped from a play of lsben or a novel of Tolstoi or Checkhov. To appear at his best he needed a play in which the environment would not be unnatural to him; In Samson and Delilah he found such a play, from curtain rise to curtain fall it is imbued with the spirit of the Slav. In its frequent, terribly effective appeals to the stage; in its lack of sentiment and its slow, careful development...