Word: ivanovic
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...signature is the pistol shot, the report of suicide just before the final curtain. But most modern productions of Chekhov ignore the pistol shot, treating it as a melodramatic fillip tagged on to two and a half hours of detached psychological observation. Sir John Gielgud's production of Ivanov, however, takes the gun shot seriously. His choice of play, his acting in the title role, and his direction, all present a more involved and perhaps truer Chekhov than is currently fashionable...
This approach has two basic flaws-it makes Chekhov a more callous observer than he actually is, and it weakens the motivation for the play's climactic violence. It is a particularly misguided way to stage Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play. There are strong traces of Chekhov himself in the main character, a disillusioned intellectual whose model estate is hopelessly in the red, whose zealotry has dwindled to cynicism. Ivanov cannot merely be observed, he must be felt...
...Ivanov is also a man driven to suicide, and suicide is inexplicable without desperation and savagery. An excess of underplaying, or more charitably, a style of ironic detachment, cannot explain a man's putting a bullet through his head...
Gielgud is convincing. His Ivanov is always on the verge of cruelty to himself, and to others. In the opening scene he nervously admits to his dying wife's doctor (played in an appropriately intolerable, stiffly self-righteous fashion by John Merivale) that as she approaches death from TB he loves her less, that her illness is simply getting on his nerves. He knows the doctor must think him a monster but, he says, rubbing his hands in agitation, and raising his voice in irritation, he just can't help...
...Distance Runner -which Tony Richardson directed-played Pasha in Zhivago, will go back into rep this summer. Albert Finney, who was Tom Jones, has a few more weeks in Arden's Armstrong's Last Goodnight at the National Theater, will next do Strindberg. Gielgud, who brings his Ivanov to the U.S. in April, this time with Vivien Leigh, was seen the last two weekends in The Ages of Man on CBS television in the U.S. Julie Christie, having finished Doctor Zhivago, starts shooting François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 this week...