Word: chekhovs
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...Month in the Country (adapted from the Russian of Ivan Turgenev by Emlyn Williams) has for some strange reason been a theatrical wallflower, while Chekhov's four daughters have constantly been given a whirl. Last produced in Manhattan in 1930, A Month remains one of those small classics that, however long kept in mothballs, keep their charming bouquet. The play needs-as the Phoenix Theater has given it-a sensitive production: Michael Redgrave has ably directed an able cast, and Emlyn Williams' adaptation is in crisply laundered English...
...tone of Powell's books recalls Chekhov-the elegiac irony of a world where the last of the wormy, golden apples of Empire were falling from the tree. Yet the essence of Jenkins' war with the world is neither bound to a period nor insularly British. It is essentially a secular tragedy told in the idiom of understatement (which Novelist Powell admits "has its own banality"); there is a pit beneath the parquet floor and the Old School Tie may become a garrote. It needs all his well-tended prose to keep the corpse of nihilism buried...
Uncle Vanya (by Anton Chekhov) is off-Broadway's latest good deed. This time though the playhouse is a tiny one on the lower East Side, the players include Cinemactor Franchot Tone and other Broadway names. Directing Vanya, as he earlier did The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, David Ross has scrupulously put Chekhov's intentions first: if he sometimes falters with so trickily delicate a play, he oftener succeeds. Chekhov's provincial tale of pathetically muffed chances and comically muddled lives, of a pompous fool for whom better people have toiled and a shallow woman...
...avoiding the sentimentalized Chekhov of sighs and samovars, this Vanya now and then overplays the comic side. But thanks to some good performances, including Actor Tone's, and to Stark Young's sensitive translation, it reveals why Chekhov-type playwrights are still panting to catch up with the master...
...best of the Soviet offerings was The Cicada (Mosfilm), an adaptation of a Chekhov story. It is a relentless dissection of a frivolous woman with delusions of culture, and of the effete salon riffraff that surrounded her in the days of the Czar. For the days of the commissars, the Soviets did less well, e.g., An Unfinished Novel (Lenfilm), in which all the resources of Soviet medicine fail to cure a paralyzed engineer, but when the girl doctor of his dreams rushes to his bedside in the last reel, he walks again...