Word: chekhovisms
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Between Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play and first single-shot suicide, and Yepikhodov's unfulfilled promise to "shoot myself so to speak" in Chekhov's last play, something has obviously happened. Laurence Senelick, directing his own translation of Cherry Orchard, pays proper attention to the writer's final, bitter playfulness by mouthing a production that breaks through the somber fragilitv of traditional Chekhovian staging to a vital if slightly fuzzy theatricality...
...hoary mist that has hung over productions of Chekhov spumed from Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater: a distinctive technique marked by precise characterization, long pauses, distilled emotion, and tight pacing that presented the final pistol shots of an Ivanov or Seagull as the Q.E.D. of human tragedy, lucidly observed. In English-language productions, all this has been sustained by country-house diction supported by the characterological self-control necessary to maintain strong emotion over long sentences. These productions were, and are often powerful but they have two chronic diseases--boredom spawned by excessive refinement of speech and movement...
Senelick's translation captures the three-part style of the play in its diction. The gentry speak standard Chekhov, Victorian dialect. The upwardly mobile Lopakhin (Ken Tigar), sweet, young Anya (Carolyn Firth) and occasional flunkeys speak a slangy, colloquial tongue, fresh and awkward; while a pod of surrounding actors, led by the shlemielesque "perennial student" Trofimov (Lloyd Schwartz), with his utopian panegyrics discoursed of Yepikhodov, talk a well-tuned language of parody and farce. None of the specific lines of the translation is, as they say, memorable--Senelick's staging eye works better than his ear--but they are smooth...
Senelick's general conception of course has weaknesses. It helplessly exposes poorly written roles, like that of Simeonov-Pischik, a rather pointless proverb-spouting neighbor played by Reggie Stuart, and Chekhov's occasional lapses of imagination. They can no longer hide behind the Slavic fog. But at the same time, the director's shaping of his Cherry Orchard makes the play funny, exciting, and intriguing as well as traditionally poignant. The play took just under three hours and you couldn't notice it, which even in the Moscow Art Theatre would be quite something...
...allowed to leave Russia. But while he was on a lecture tour in England, his Russian citizenship was taken away. He became a Greek national, and now lives in West Germany. The Pleasure Factory is his best book to date. It shows that he has read his Chekhov and Turgenev with profit-and that neither greed nor the other passions they wrote about have been abolished in the new Russia...