Word: chekhovian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
IVANOV is the first of the Chekhovian unheroic heroes, who fall not from grace to sin but from enthusiasm to ennui, who do not so much lose their souls as their spirit. John Gielgud's listless acting and direction unfortunately seem infected with a similar malaise...
Gielgud, the director, hews more closely to the conventional line. The detachment is here more appropriate since it is Ivanov's detachment from the other characters, not merely the audience's detachment from the play. Gielgud orchestrates for a marvelous band of Chekhovian eccentrics-Dillon Evans as a monomaniacal bridge player, Ethel Griffies as a sour-faced marriage broker, Ronald Radd in a somewhat deeper role as the manager of Ivanov's estate, a man whose visions of wealth are only equalled by his incompetence...
...whole crew assembles in the first act for the archetypal boring, Chekhovian party. Thirteen characters saunter about, titter, and listen through their earhorns to the tittering of others. At the fall of the first-act curtain this same group swarms in with sparklers, pouring around the shocked Vivien Leigh who is staring at Sasha (Jennifer Hilary), the neighbor's daughter, in Ivanov's arms. Gielgud jars the audience, giving them perhaps two seconds to take in the entire scene...
Time of Indifference. Heavy rainfall sets the mood of movie dramas like this one. Worthless, once-wealthy people go walking in the rain or huddle in the Chekhovian gloom of their mortgaged Italian villa, gazing out at the drizzle. Someone plays the piano. Someone moves tentatively toward a hopeless sexual liaison. Someone keeps insisting that the important thing is for people to tell one another the truth...
Only O'Neill's family is sufficiently doomed to be called tragic. Miller's people are defeated; Williams' clan is haunted, principally by "the long delayed but always-expected something that we live for." The Glass Menagerie is thus the most Chekhovian play of the U.S.'s most Chekhovian playwright. Its mood is mist before the eyes; yet it is propelled as inexorably as the tides. At its heart is the demonic mover of the seemingly motionless-time. The texture of the play is music: nocturnal, poignant and poetic...