Both directors and actors are confronted with many perplexing problems when they deal with Chekhov's full length plays. Perhaps the most perplexing are those which they meet in the attempt to discover and express the dramatic significance of Chekhov's dialogue. The difficulty is not that Chekhov's dialogue requires any unusual acting techniques, but rather that it has no obvious form. It seems to be rambling, disconnected, and irrelevant. Take for example a brief scene from the first act of The Three Sisters. Olga has been grading papers and thinking aloud about her father's funeral, the drudgery of her job, and her long held hope of going to Moscow. Irina picks up the Moscow refrain and then Olga again goes into one of her "catch-all" speeches:

You look radiant today, lovelier than ever. And Masha is lovely, too. Andrey would be good looking if he hadn't got so heavy, it's not becoming to him. And I've grown older, a lot thinner; it must be because I get cross with the girls. Now that I'm free today and am here at home and my head's not aching, I feel younger than yesterday. I'm only twenty-eight.… It's all good, all God's will, but it seems to me if I had married and stayed at home all day long, it would have been better. (A pause) I'd have loved my husband.

When one realizes how much of this kind of associative talk goes on in Chekhov, it is not too difficult to understand why some critics (Walter Kerr and William Archer, for example) see in Chekhov's plays only a formless mass without conflict or progression.

The apparent formlessness of Chekhovs' dialogue is even more clear when we compare Olga's speech with a more conventional speech in modern drama, say a speech by Lady Utterword in Shaw's "Chekhovian" play, Heartbreak House. Lady Utterword is home after an absence of twenty-three years and she finds everything as chaotic as ever. Her father and the nurse are disrespectful. She cannot even get a cup of tea. "Sitting down with a flounce on the sofa," she says to Ellie Dunn, who also has not been received properly:

I know what you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after twenty-three years; and it is just the same: nobody at home to receive anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they're always gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and what is worse the same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling. When I was a child I was used to it: I had never known anything better, though I was unhappy, and longed all the time—Oh, how I longed! to be respectable, to be a lady, to live as others did, not to have to think of everything for myself.… And now the state of the house! the way I'm received! the casual impudence of that woman Guinness … You must excuse my going on in this way; but I am really very much hurt and annoyed and disillusioned.…

Like Olga, Lady Utterword is also "thinking aloud" about her home, her past and her family. She also is distressed. But unlike Olga, her speech is obviously prompted by events around her. She feels herself horribly insulted and everything she says represents her reaction against those who affront her sense of conventional decency. She sticks to the point; her ideas are clearly connected. The speech is obviously dramatic.

Even when the ideas in a Chekhov speech are clearly and logically connected, the speech is often confusing for another reason. Conventionally, speech in drama is a device for simultaneous two way communication: the characters talk directly with each other and at the same time they talk indirectly to the audience. But in Chekhov, these two functions of dialogue seem often separated. The characters seem to be talking to themselves in a daze primarily for the purpose of giving the audience direct exposition. Chekhov appears to have done Scribe one better. Scribe had to have two servants dusting while they gave the audience background information. Chekhov can get by with only one character, who need not even be dusting.

Consider, for example, the opening conversation between Lopahin and Dunyasha in The Cherry Orchard. Lopahin, the merchant, and Dunyasha, the maid, have been anxiously awaiting the train which will bring Madame Ranevskaya and her entourage. Dunyasha tells Lopahin that the train has arrived. He answers: "… thank God… But how late was the train? Two hours at least. (Yawning and stretching.) I'm a fine one, I am, look what a fool thing I did!—You could have waked me up." Dunyasha then replies: "I thought you had gone. (Listening) Listen, I think they are coming now." Lopahin listens and then says:

No—no, there's the luggage and one thing and another. (A pause) Lyuboff Andreyevna has been living abroad five years. I don't know what she is like now—She is a good woman. An easy-going simple woman. I remember when I was a boy about fifteen, my father, who is at rest—in those days he ran a shop here in the village—hit me in the face with his fist, my nose was bleeding.—we'd come to the yard together for something or other, and he was a little drunk. Lyuboff Andreyevna, I can see her now, still so young, so slim, led me to the wash-basin here in this very room, in the nursery. "Don't cry," she says, "little peasant, it will be well in time for your wedding"—(a pause) Yes, little peasant—My father was a peasant truly, and here I am in a white waistcoat and yellow shoes. Like a pig rooting in a pastry shop—I've got this rich, lots of money, but if you really stop and think of it, I'm just a peasant—(turning the pages of a book) Here I was reading a book and didn't get a thing out of it. Reading and went to sleep. (A pause)

As if she had not heard a word, Dunyasha replies: "And all night long the dogs were not asleep, they know their masters are coming."

As we can see, Lopahin and Dunyasha communicate with each other only occasionally. Although they both share the stage, they seem to be talking more to themselves than to each other. Lopahin's long monologue seems to be there merely to get background information across to the audience. Dunyasha does not engage in any conflict with Lopahin which would force him to talk at such length. She either knows most of what he says or she is not interested in it at the moment. It does not affect her in any way. There seems to be no dramatic relationship between the characters or between them and the situation in which they find themselves.

When a Shakespearean character speaks to himself, he is obviously engaging in a struggle which is an expression of the central conflict of the play and which leads to new action. Take Macbeth's "If it were done when 't is done" speech for example. Everything Macbeth says there expresses his struggle to overcome his qualms of conscience or his fear of retribution. This speech is part of the process by which he whips himself up to the point of murdering Duncan. Like Shakespeare's soliloquies, most modern soliloquies are obviously relevant to the central conflict and plot of the play. When Peer Gynt, for example, expostulates to himself on the beauty of Anitra the slave girl [in Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt], we are not at a loss for one moment. We have seen his daydreaming tendencies before. The contrast between his idealized version of the girl and her dirty legs and selfish actions shows us immediately not only what kind of a man Peer is, but also points ahead to his financial ruin at her hands.

Even if we suppose that Lopahin is in a semi-conscious state, and therefore cannot be expected to talk with as much point as Macbeth or Peer Gynt, the speech still seems mere verbiage. Arthur Miller's salesman, Willy Loman, is a dazed and broken character who often talks to himself. But although he may be dazed and prone to "lose himself in reminiscences," Miller always makes obvious the meaning of Willy's speeches to himself. As the flashbacks which usually attend Willy's "thinking aloud" sessions indicate, he is either trying to relive an idealized dream of the past, or he is punishing himself for having committed some wrong. On the other hand, nothing Lopahin says seems to express his feelings or desires. It is no wonder then that directors and actors have difficulty understanding how Chekhov's speech reveals character or expresses the conflicts within the play.

But a close examination of the dialogue reveals that Lopahin's rambling remarks are, in fact, actually expressive of internal conflict which is an integral part of the central conflict of the play. Lopahin has only partially accomplished his purpose of greeting the Ranevskayas by going to the Cherry Orchard. Once there, instead of going to the station to meet the returning party, he goes to sleep. Upon awakening, he chides himself for not completing his purpose. He both starts and ends his musings on this chiding note. He seems to be scolding some impulse or desire within himself which has prevented his conscious will from achieving its aim.

Lopahin is torn by guilt for deeper causes, however, than mere oversleeping. He questions his right even to be at the Cherry Orchard. "My father was a peasant truly,… I'm just a peasant [too].…" As a peasant by birth and upbringing, he feels that he is subservient to the Ranevskayas. He still remembers the time when the honor of being in the nursery could compensate for his father's beatings. Yet, as a freed serf, he has the money and the desire to be an aristocrat. He scolds himself for desiring to rise above his class, "like a pig rooting in a pastry shop," and yet he wants to do just that. Thus, when he meditates upon the incongruity of the peasant in white waistcoat, he is struggling to reconcile the conflicting desires within himself.

He is so torn by conflicting desires that even his attempt to "talk himself awake" becomes a form of day dreaming. For at the very moment that he is trying to "wake up" so that he can greet the Ranevskayas, he goes into a kind of reverie about what the orchard has meant to him in the past: "I remember when I was a boy about fifteen.…" His reverie begins as an attempt to define his problem, but it becomes a means of escaping from it. By concentrating on what appears to him an insoluble conflict, he loses the will to act. Instead he ends by merely scolding himself because he really does not properly use his aristocratic skill of reading. He substitutes recognition of his problem for solution of the problem.

Lopahin's apparently non-functional speech is really functional in several ways. In the first place, it is a means by which he chides himself for shirking his responsibilities toward the Ranevskayas. Second, it helps to build up in his own mind the importance of those responsibilities and to define them more clearly so that he will try harder to accomplish them. And third, it allows him to talk and thus escape the reality of his problems by letting him concentrate on merely recognizing the problem instead of on trying to solve it. Since the third of these functions is opposed to the other two, Lopahin's speech works like his dream-seeking action: it sets up a tension which keeps him acting in the attempt to reconcile the contradictions within himself.

All of the major characters in the play face problems similar to Lopahin's: like him, they are torn by contradictory impulses and desires. Madame Ranevskaya and Gayeff can passionately desire to save the Orchard at any cost, and yet refrain completely from doing anything to save it because they desire to keep the Orchard intact as a symbol of past bliss. Anna and Trofimoff can love each other deeply and yet refrain from marriage because of their dedication to abstract ideals.

Since the characters' attempts to achieve any of their important aims are thwarted by their opposing desires, like Lopahin they indulge in daydreams. But again like Lopahin, they do even this for two opposing reasons: one, to reaffirm their aims, and two, to escape from the difficulties they have in achieving those aims. Madame Ranevskaya and Gayeff grow angry when faced with the reality of their problems, and like Lopahin, they escape into the past. Madame Ranevskaya rhapsodizes about what the nursery has meant to her; Gayeff makes a speech to the desk about how it has served the family. But rhapsodizing about the nursery and eulogizing the desk serve finally to again remind Madame Ranevskaya and Gayeff of their present problems. Like Lopahin, they become more determined to solve the problems; and also like Lopahin, they use recognition of a problem as a comfortable escape from attempting any real solution to it.

Like the daydreams of Lopahin, Madame Ranevskaya, and Gayeff, those of the other important characters usually take the form of sentimental talk about the Cherry Orchard. Nearly everyone envisages it as a Utopia where he can achieve the purposeful, unified life he so desperately wants. It becomes for everyone a symbol of the ideal for which he is striving. By thinking and talking about the ideal world they envision, Chekhov's characters gain a feeling of purpose. They delude themselves into believing that they are actually bringing unity and purpose into their lives.

But occasionally they discover that their escape into sentimental daydreams is actually preventing them from solving any of the problems. As Trofimoff says, "Apparently, with us, all the fine talk is only to divert the attention of ourselves and of others." Varya, too, realizes that talk will not make Lopahin propose. As she says, "It's two years now; everyone has been talking to me about him, everyone talks, and he either remains silent or jokes." It is this partial awareness of the discrepancy between their aims and their achievements which keeps them struggling to achieve their aims. Lopahin tries again and again to persuade Madame Ranevskaya that she must divide the Orchard into commercial lots if she is to save it. Gayeff tries to face his problems despite his tendency to lapse into daydreams or sentimental talk. Madame Ranevskaya struggles to keep her mind on her present problems, and not on her past bliss. But always the characters allow the dream of unity and purpose to substitute for actions which will achieve their purpose. And since they allow their thoughts and words to take the place of any direct action which might help them achieve what they want, they must fall. As Lopahin says to Madame Ranevskaya after he has bought the orchard, "Why, then, didn't you listen to me? My poor dear, it can't be undone now. Oh, if this could all be over soon, if somehow our awkward, unhappy life would be changed!"

Chekhov's dialogue then is functional because of its rambling, formless quality, not in spite of it. With such dialogue Chekhov has hit upon a perfect means of making objective the constant struggle his characters have between their desire to act realistically in order to solve their problems and their desire to daydream in one form or another in order to avoid their problems. But because talk gives them both a way of struggling and a way of avoiding struggle, they allow it to divert them from saving the Orchard. Thus, far from being irrelevent, Chekhov's dialogue is actually the essential expression of the central conflict in The Cherry Orchard.

Irving Deer, "Speech as Action in Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard'" in Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. X, No. 1, March, 1958, pp. 30-4.