Word: chekhovisms
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...indeed, made the biggest splash-when, at season's end, England's famed Old Vic grandly invaded Broadway. After advancing with Shakespeare and being repulsed with Chekhov, the Old Vic swept on to triumph with Sophocles' Oedipus the King, giving Broadway its greatest theatrical experience in years...
...their third and last bill. So far, England's Old Vic had given Broadway some good Shakespeare and some dubious Chekhov (TIME, May 20, 27). But last week they gave Broadway its greatest theatrical experience in years. Reaching back 25 centuries to Sophocles, they bodied forth, as superb theater, as searing tragedy, his Oedipus the King...
Where the Old Vic pre-eminently caught Shakespeare's spirit in Henry IV, in Uncle Vanya they only fitfully captured Chekhov's tone. The direction seemed fussy in some places, off-center in others; two or three roles were misplayed, and in the title role Ralph Richardson, though always a good actor, seemed miscast...
Potshots and Self-Pity. A typical Chekhov study of frustration, the play is over, in a sense, before it starts: all that is left to most of its people is recriminations and regrets. A selfish mediocrity whose family pampered him and thought him great, Professor Serebryakou is peevish now for having got nowhere, for having got old. Middleaged, rust-covered Vanya -who has sacrificed his life to the professor and declared too late his love for the professor's shallow, pretty wife-wallows in self-pity, and when finally roused to rage takes potshots at the professor-and misses...
...drama of these people is that they have recoiled from drama, are unfit for drama-can only poke around in the cupboard of memories and might-have-been. That, too, is the pathos of them. But it is a pathos that Chekhov sharply rings with humor and partly punctures with insight. Always compassionate, he is never deceived. The wand he waves to evoke moods suddenly becomes a scalpel that lays motives bare. He sees all that is flabby-and all that is funny-in these people who make mournfulness their métier...