Pennington Chekhov's Three Sisters

A Study Guide
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78850-205-4
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 192 Seiten

Reihe: Page to Stage study guides

The Nick Hern Books Page to Stage series - highly accessible guides to the world's best-known plays, written by established theatre professionals to show how the plays come to life on the stage. Actor Michael Pennington conducts us scene by scene through the action of Chekhov's Three Sisters, analysing moment by moment what is actually said and done, and how the staging of these moments affects our understanding of them. Also included in this volume: a concise introduction to Chekhov and the historical background of the play; discussions of the play's themes and of Chekhov's playwriting technique; and individual studies of each of the play's characters. Ideal for anyone studying, teaching or performing Three Sisters, as well as anyone interested in how the play works on stage.

Michael Pennington is a British actor, director and writer. He has played a variety of leading roles in the West End, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, for the National Theatre and for the English Shakespeare Company, of which he was co-founder and joint Artistic Director from 1986-1992. He has also directed several of Shakespeare's plays, and is the author of books on Hamlet, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream, amongst others. He has toured his solo shows, Sweet William and Anton Chekhov, throughout the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pennington, Michael

Leseproben

Despite predicting that it might turn out to be ‘boring Crimean rubbish’, Chekhov settled down to write in the autumn of 1900, after nearly a year of believing that though he might have a theme he had no idea how to dramatise it. As he complained to Olga Knipper, the new play would look sadly up at him from his desk as he looked sadly back at it, and from time to time one of his heroines would suddenly ‘go lame’.

Behind him at this point were twenty years as a writer of short stories, some of which are still regarded as masterpieces in the genre. However, though he had had success with one-act farces and monologues, several of which are still performed, his first three full-length plays had been far from successful. There was an unperformed early piece which we now know as ; , which was only a moderate success; and , a failure which he nevertheless used as the basis for the later, greater . In 1896 , generally thought to be his first major play, was premiered in St Petersburg with an unsuitable company and inadequate rehearsal and was more or less booed off the stage. During the following year succeeded in Russia’s provinces, and in 1898 Chekhov, after much hesitation, authorised a revival of by the newly-formed Moscow Art Theatre: it was a triumph. Soon he was being seen as Russia’s leading dramatist, and his subsequent career until his death in 1904 was inseparable from this company, who then presented a revived and his last two plays, and

THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE

The Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) was led by the director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and the actor Konstantin Stanislavsky. At the time of its founding, Russian theatre was stuck in outdated styles of acting and melodramatic situations. The star actor or actress was seen as the most important element, there was no such thing as a director in our sense, and the author was not much regarded – the poster for the first production of had carried Chekhov’s name in tiny lettering compared to those of the actors and the date. Chekhov disliked this as much as his new colleagues, though he was not entirely innocent of the old faults. Both and have traditional features, such as a huge central part complete with several monologues addressed to the audience, and a fatal gunshot at the end. The MAT gave him the chance to find his true and lasting voice. The company was insistent on certain principles that our modern theatre takes for granted – a director-led ensemble would have adequate rehearsal time, the star performer would be less important than the team, and the mood of a play should be expressed by careful design and the delicate realisation of relationships between the characters. It was perfect for Chekhov’s style: the collaboration on the revived was a huge turning-point for all concerned. The six remaining years of Chekhov’s short life (he died at forty-four) confirmed both their and his place in theatre history: until very recently the MAT curtain carried the emblem of a seagull.

Nevertheless Chekhov had many reservations about the company’s style, which he often found gloomy, slow and overreverent. He particularly disliked their elaborately created ‘real’ sound effects – and no doubt, pre-dating recorded sound as they do, they would strike us as pretty crude as well; but they were achieved with great ingenuity. For instance, the sound of a mouse scratching behind the wainscoting of a wall was done by actors standing in the wings and rubbing their hands on toothpicks made of goose quills. And for all his suspiciousness, Chekhov knew that he had found the right circumstances for his work at last.

WRITING FOR THE ART THEATRE

His involvement with the MAT means that, with Chekhov is writing for the first time specifically for colleagues he knows – in fact he was shortly to marry its leading actress, Olga Knipper. His old schoolfriend Andrei Vishnevsky was already in his mind to play Kulygin the schoolteacher. And in a particularly vivid example, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was to play Tuzenbakh, was, as the character would be, of German parentage, and had taken Russian nationality a few years before (in the event Meyerhold left the cast before the opening). So, like Shakespeare and Molère before him, Chekhov was to some extent able to tailor his characters to the particular talents of his actors. In a playful letter, he promised Vishnevsky that he would be able to wear a frock coat and a ribbon with a medal on it around his neck, while he warned Olga Knipper that she would have to pay him ten roubles for writing her such a good part, or he would give it to another actress.

During the arduous period of composition, certain influences on his thinking are evident. As a young man he had spent a long summer holiday in a garrison town where one of his brothers had a job as a teacher. He noticed how the army officers liked to break up their dull routine with long sessions of philosophical debate. It was not what was said but the energy of the argument that kept them going. In Chekhov extended this idea by suggesting that such philosophising could also be used as the means of seduction by which Vershinin precipitates the tragedy of Masha Prozorov. In his book , Donald Rayfield has also pointed out that Chekhov had been reading about the Brontë family, with their three sisters and failed brother, children of a powerful father and forgotten mother; and also to the fact that Chekhov had himself been involved with no fewer than five families of three sisters in his life.

LOCATION OF THE PLAY

The other significant difference between and his earlier plays is that Chekhov breaks with his own habit as to its location. It is still quite a shock to remember the limited range of people and places about which he generally wrote. , and are set in a part of Russia that, though not spelt out, is fairly easily identified as the central provinces towards the south of the country, between Moscow and the Crimea, on old estates now struggling to remain viable. With , Chekhov had another idea: it is, uniquely, set ‘in a large provincial town’. He does not name it, but immediately on completing the play he wrote to his friend Maxim Gorky that he was imagining a place like Perm, which is on the edge of the Ural mountains that separate European Russian from Asia, seven hundred miles northeast of Moscow. At that time there was no direct railway link to Moscow, only a twice-weekly connection with St Petersburg (two days’ travel), and precious little with anywhere else in the region. The area is far less easy of access than southern Russia, and less temperate: Olga Prozorov complains of the late arrival of spring right at the start of the play.

The sisters’ town is sizeable enough – Andrei Prozorov speaks of a hundred thousand inhabitants. But in other ways the characters might as well be in Siberia; and from the outset the practical difficulty of getting to Moscow is made clear. This is counterpointed all the time with the undeniable fact that as well-off young people they could achieve it if they really tried. This paradox becomes central to the play: they could change their lives but they don’t. The tubercular Chekhov was living in the south of Russia, about the same distance from Moscow as was Perm; he missed Moscow life (and Olga Knipper) a great deal, and is writing a play about exactly that longing.

A SETBACK

On 23 October 1900, Chekhov undertook the long journey to Moscow with his new script to read it with the assembled company. They seem to have found the play difficult, even saying it was impossible to act, or that it was not so much a play as ‘a prospectus’; one actor said he disagreed with the author ‘in principle’. Stanislavsky reports that Chekhov was particularly perturbed because he thought that he had written a comedy, whereas everyone took the play as a ‘drama’ and wept at it, so that he thought he had quite failed in his intentions. This matter of definition was a chronic problem between him and the company. He had a general habit of sub-titling his plays, however serious, as comedies, as he did and , or at most as ‘Scenes from Country Life’ (): is the only one (somewhat belying his complaint) described as ‘a drama’. It is also true that while he insisted to the MAT that it was ‘light-hearted, a comedy’, he was describing it to other people as ‘gloomier than gloom’.

REHEARSALS

In any case, by 11 December Chekhov had had enough of these misunderstandings and was on his way to Nice, where he rewrote sections of Act Three and, particularly, Act Four. From here he corresponded anxiously with the actors and director about the progress of rehearsals, which had now begun. He is pleased to hear from Olga Knipper that she has found the right walk for Masha. On the other hand, he is annoyed to hear that the play’s Olga keeps taking Irina by the arm and walking her about: ‘Can’t she get around on her own?’ Perhaps more importantly,...