Word: ivanovic
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After tripping backward into a love triangle, Ivanov, queasy with guilt, lashes out directly at his wife (a convert from Judaism played by Vivien Leigh). Gielgud's fingers claw at the nonexistent handle of a desk drawer, his eyes hesitate. His voice pauses for an instant and then spills out the word, "Jewess!" Finally, he tells her the doctor thinks she will die very soon, and his flaring agitation dies down to remorse...
...short, Gielgud is never afraid to play Ivanov to the hilt. He fully, uses his absolute mastery of technique -- spewing lines at fantastic speed which still remain intelligible, of keeping his hands in constant motion. Just before his death, within the space of 90 seconds Ivanov goes through three distinct phases--black laughter, broken despair, and suicidal resolve. This is theatricality in the grand manner, and Gielgud carries it off. His Ivanov has the desperation and the savagery, and his suicide is not only believable, it is inevitable...
Gielgud, the director, hews more closely to the conventional line. The detachment is here more appropriate since it is Ivanov's detachment from the other characters, not merely the audience's detachment from the play. Gielgud orchestrates for a marvelous band of Chekhovian eccentrics-Dillon Evans as a monomaniacal bridge player, Ethel Griffies as a sour-faced marriage broker, Ronald Radd in a somewhat deeper role as the manager of Ivanov's estate, a man whose visions of wealth are only equalled by his incompetence...
...party. Thirteen characters saunter about, titter, and listen through their earhorns to the tittering of others. At the fall of the first-act curtain this same group swarms in with sparklers, pouring around the shocked Vivien Leigh who is staring at Sasha (Jennifer Hilary), the neighbor's daughter, in Ivanov's arms. Gielgud jars the audience, giving them perhaps two seconds to take in the entire scene...
...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...