Word: chekhovs
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...Ivanov. Chekhov's anti-heroes lead lives of tragic farce. Where the Marx Brothers once chopped up a train (in Go West) and fueled the engine with the kindling in order to keep going, Chekhov's pinched landowners would rather die than chop down their forests. They have champagne tastes-intellectually and spiritually-on vodka incomes. Their hearts are even emptier than their purses. The title character of Chekhov's first full-length play, a man in paralytic despair, candidly performs a self-autopsy: "I haven't the heart to believe in anything. I hope...
ROMEO AND JULIET (Caedmon) is a strange romance in this recording. Albert Finney, who can be as forceful as TNT, has conceived a Romeo who sounds like a world-weary anti-hero out of Chekhov. Claire Bloom is girlishly gigglish; yet Shakespeare's Juliet is young only in years, and packs a woman's wiles in a woman's body. The lovers are upstaged by the nurse, Dame Edith Evans, a paragon of timing, inflection and character immersion who could teach Finney and Bloom a thing or three about Shakespearean acting...
...Connolly reading list [March 25] is hopelessly provincial. However you define modernism, it is an international phenomenon. Yet Connolly leaves out Ibsen and Strindberg, Nietzsche and Rilke, Tolstoy and Chekhov, all of whom surely have "helped shape the contemporary mind" to a far greater degree than Ivy Compton-Burnett or Henri Michaux. What about Marinetti and Cavafy and Karel Capek and Federigo Garcia Lorca and other influential thinkers who did not happen to write in English or French...
...elements of Gielgud's Ivanov interfere with the general tone of the production--the two younger women and the problem of Ivanov's age. Miss Leigh and Miss Hilary try hard in extremely vapid roles. Chekhov was always weak at creating women who were neither old nor eccentric, and at this early stage of his career he was terrible. Miss Leigh might have played Ivanov's genteel, tubercular wife as a little more ill and a little less sweet, but simply coughing louder could not have added depth to a structurally shallow role. Miss Hilary is given two types...
Gielgud is already safely ensconced in the Olympus of English-speaking actors and it is a tribute to his talent that he continues to try new approaches. A director of his skill and standing was needed to infuse a new passion into Chekhov and restore the pistol shot to the core of Chekhov...