Word: chekhovisms
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N.E.T. PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, produced by Sir Laurence Olivier and featuring the original Chichester Festival Theater cast: Dame Sybil Thorndike, Sir Michael Redgrave, Rosemary Harris, Joan Plowright, Max Adrian, and Olivier himself...
...CHERRY ORCHARD (Caedmon). The Minnesota Theater Company, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie, gives a balanced rendition of Chekhov's complex last play. The playwright set out to write a comedy about the social types in a changing Russia, but his characters, while absurd in their inflexibility, are also elegiac in their ineffectuality. Jessica Tandy plays an aristocratic Ranevskaya, as flowery as her beloved orchard and just as fruitless. As the arriviste, Lee Richardson is believably ambivalent as he reluctantly reaps triumph over his former employers. Hume Cronyn, however, sounds too nasally shrewd to be the bumbling clerk...
...IVANOV. Chekhov's first full-length play takes the pulse of a life-sick anti-hero consumed by boredom and narcotized by talk, the opiate of the Russian gentry. John Gielgud's acting and direction somewhat jangle the playwright's night music of the soul, but not enough to drive away a lover of Chekhov's genius...
...IVANOV. Chekhov's first full-length play takes the pulse of a life-sick anti-hero consumed by boredom and narcotized by talk, the opiate of the Russian gentry. John Gielgud's acting and direction somewhat jangle the playwright's night music of the soul, but not enough to drive away a lover of Chekhov's genius...
...Chekhov had a gift for giving life to the life-sick which is somehow lacking in John Gielgud's curiously inanimate performance. The pukka sahib accents of the cast conjure up stiff-lipped Britons muddling through, rather than Russians sucked under in emotional quicksands. Chekhov's night music of the soul, so beautifully attuned in Director William Ball's 1958 off-Broadway revival, is jangled here. At its purest, it is an ineffable resonance of laughter and tears, making the whole world kin. It is unthinkable that anyone who loves Chekhov would miss the Gielgud production...