Word: chekhovisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...died, but whose characters were immutable and immortal. Witnessing great drama means spending an evening with these immortals. The Three Sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, who yearn in vain to go to Moscow, have a place in the minds and hearts of people who have never even seen the Chekhov play...
...second offering of its premiere engagement in Los Angeles, the British National Theater performs with its usual eclat while somewhat scanting the poetic mood music of the play. Chekhov is not wholly Chekhovian without a certain hauntingly sad fragility, like a Chopin nocturne heard by moonlight. In the manner of his closest U.S. counterpart, Tennessee Williams, Chekhov is a poet of bruised hearts and defeated hopes, a laureate of losers...
...director of this current revival, Sir Laurence Olivier, is not temperamentally equipped to stress the sense of loss. With a brisk, nononsense, let's-get-on-with-it approach, he sounds all the optimistic notes in The Three Sisters. The emphasis is on Chekhov's hopes that work and intelligence and energy will change and save the pre-Revolutionary Russia of sloth, injustice and decay. There is something ironic about...
...Chekhov's evangelistic fervor for the value of work, since his characters would not have been a tenth as fascinating if one actually saw them working. It is almost axiomatic that in the finest plays no one works. Great drama consists mostly of people fighting, hating, making love (licit and illicit), living in a family, being frightened, being bored, reminiscing about the past, wallowing in self-pity, making jokes, mourning, drinking, talking and dying. Because it contains almost all of these things, the protean stuff of life, The Three Sisters is eternally compelling theater...
Chestnutty As They Come. It is with The Beaux' Stratagem that the British National Theater, headed by Sir Laurence Olivier, has chosen to open its first U.S. engagement, a six-week run at Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theater during which the company will also do Chekhov's Three Sisters. Stratagem is a slightly odd choice in that a mighty ensemble of actors is laboring over a mite of a classic. It is rather like the winner of the Grand National demonstrating how to clear a two-foot hedge. Naturally, this superb company does it with grace, stamina...