SOURCE: Brown, John Russell. “Chekhov on the British Stage: Differences.” In Chekhov on the British Stage, edited and translated by Patrick Miles, pp. 6-19. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Brown examines how The Seagull and Chekhov's other plays have been interpreted on the British stage.]

Productions of Chekhov's plays in Britain provide yearly proof of this dramatist's wide and lasting influence. But a look behind the playbills will reveal more—that these plays have affected the British sense of what theatre can be. In performance they reinforce a persistent belief that the stage can hold a mirror up to life, and clarify the very forms and pressures of present-day existence.

During the last 350 years, no other dramatist writing in a language that is not English has seemed to speak in Britain with such assurance, or to use means that are so readily understood. Chekhov is more accessible than Molière, Racine, Strindberg, Pirandello, Lope de Vega, Calderón, Schiller, Kleist, Gorky or Bulgakov. Brecht and Ibsen provide many more plays for production, but they are seldom staged with that sense of confidence and possession which usually accompanies revivals of Chekhov's four masterpieces.

Yet in obvious ways great barriers surround these plays: language difficulties, of course; different folk and intellectual traditions; different social values and social behaviour; divergent histories; and little familiar access from one nation to another. The Russian language is not spoken by many in Britain, and for centuries few theatre people have travelled to Moscow, Leningrad or the varying countryside that Chekhov knew and loved. But for all this, following the first London productions of Chekhov's plays—whether ‘Comedy’, ‘Scenes from Country Life’, or ‘Drama’—the difficulties which belong to works originating in so remote a ‘world’ have either been overcome and forgotten, or else forgotten and ignored. These plays have been appropriated by a theatre and a public which knew comparatively little about the stage or the audience for which they were written.

I

Few British theatre directors have come to prominence in recent years without working on Chekhov's plays; and each of them seems to have had a powerful and individual compulsion to do so. In 1978, Peter Hall knew that he had to turn to Chekhov. After directing Harold Pinter's No Man's Land—set in a single room overlooking a park, with memories of the past heavy in each character's mind, while the present proves to be inscrutable and resistant—Hall chose to direct The Cherry Orchard and started rehearsals sure of his intentions.¹ Its characters seemed to him to be forever separate, absorbed in their own unsatisfied concerns, possessed of no certain territory. Yet the production also had that sense of ensemble and finesse which was notable in Hall's productions of Mozart's operas undertaken during the same years. These isolated and unappeased individuals were locked, as if by destiny, in unavoidable impasse.

Jonathan Miller, a director who can animate the interface of characters in argument with brilliant and unexpected wit, who is able to free his actors to find new life in the words they speak, was also drawn to Chekhov. His Seagull (1974) at Greenwich was played in repertoire with Hamlet and Ibsen's Ghosts, which he also directed, so that mothers and sons, and absent fathers, were defined in part by contrast to those in their companion plays. This Chekhov production was not sumptuous or lyrical in setting, or delicately real in portraying lived experience, as others have been, and it had little sense of continuous social or political life; but the director's pleasure in what had happened between characters in rehearsal, and his encouragement of his actors to explore differences of intention and meaning, seemed to have sharpened the intelligence of all his cast. This Chekhov had unusual edge and spirit, and a sense of quest; its characters engaged with each other, using words with accuracy and relish.

Lindsay Anderson arrived at Chekhov after directing a number of politically responsible films, which could be meticulously realistic or else fantastic and surreal, and after staging a series of plays by David Storey at the Royal Court Theatre which were grounded in shared social and professional activity—The Contractor, The Changing Room, Life-Class. He brought to the Russian texts a sense of corporate and continuous life, and of ingrained habits and unspoken objectives. According to one commentator, his Seagull of 1975 was ‘despite a good ensemble … surprisingly heavy’;² but other critics found the production to be strong, responsible, and enlightening.

Mike Alfreds, founder and Artistic Director of the small touring company Shared Experience, had developed a style of acting that was active and demonstrative. He specialized in lively narrative productions using literary texts and employing a few actors in multiple roles, such as The Arabian Nights and Bleak House. He had also staged a free-moving commedia dell'arte production of The Merchant of Venice. His actors could move across an empty stage at any speed and interact like percussionists, without embarrassment at the unlikeliness of such an overflow of energy in life off stage. When Alfreds turned to Chekhov, the plays became explosive at times; he emphasized the dynamics of their action, the clashes of the characters' temperaments and intentions, the discordance of their activities. Unlikely physical reactions were encouraged from the actors, who seemed to perform with improvised spontaneity. Very quickly he achieved a series of productions (1981-6).

The Cherry Orchard of the now-expatriate Peter Brook reached Brooklyn, in 1987, after many cast-changes and several years of reconsideration. Here the characters were quietly and slowly involved with their own selves; they seemed to choose what they said and did as if, as people, they were all very special actors but not necessarily very talented ones. The play seemed pampered, and the consciousness of the characters both profound and ordinary, in a theatrical manner. The show was all of a piece: it was a slow pageant about life as theatre, existence as a serious-minded performance which had been meticulously crafted.

Michael Blakemore, Michael Bogdanov, Richard Eyre, John Gielgud, Peter Gill, Trevor Nunn, Laurence Olivier, Philip Prowse, Toby Robertson—each of these British directors has found his own way of working with Chekhov's texts and in doing so they have all attracted gifted casts for their productions. But the story is different for British actors: rather than making distinct contributions to the way Chekhov is performed and perceived, actors have developed, refined, and deepened their talents by appearing in Chekhov's plays. The actors seem to fit into their characters unostentatiously, almost easily.

Gielgud, Guinness, Laughton, Olivier, Redgrave, Richardson, Scofield; Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench, Edith Evans, Vanessa Redgrave, Flora Robson, Athene Seyler, Sybil Thorndike, Dorothy Tutin; Albert Finney, Michael Gambon, Ian McKellen, Jonathan Pryce, Ronald Pickup, and so on: the roll-call of actors in Chekhov is a short-list of the most accomplished in Britain during the last half-century. In 1984 Ian McKellen would claim that ‘Anton Chekhov is every British actor's second-favourite playwright’—even though at that time his own appreciation was ‘as a theatre-goer rather than an actor’.³ Part of the attraction, beyond individual roles gratifying to the best of actors, has been the opportunity to develop a very British sense of team-work. Ian McKellen continued:

We recognize of Chekhov, what we don't yet, in our hearts, accept of Shakespeare, that only when every part—each lazy valet, each stoical nanny, each gypsy violinist—has been perfectly cast, costumed and acted, can the whole play be fully realized. Actors climb up Chekhov like a mountain, roped together, sharing the glory if they ever make it to the summit.⁴

II

Unquestionably Shakespeare has been the most influential single force in shaping a distinctly British theatre, and a brief list of differences between his plays and those of Chekhov, or between the worlds and theatres that give rise to them, would seem to argue against any easy assimilation of the Russian dramatist by British theatre. Certainly Shakespeare's plays which are focussed strongly on a single hero—Richard II and Richard III, Henry V, Hamlet, Lear, Shylock, Rosalind, Falstaff, Prospero—require different casting, rehearsal, and direction from Chekhov's, which depend upon eight or nine characters of almost equal weight, exposure, and significance. When Shakespeare does hold the focus on a pair of characters—the Macbeths, Antony and Cleopatra, Benedick and Beatrice, Othello and Iago—both hold equal attention for only a few scenes. When his plays depend upon six or more characters, these are not members of a single family or small social circle as in Chekhov, but they come from very separate worlds, such as the rival parties of the history plays or the social divides of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline.

In choice of action, setting, and dialogue, the two authors could scarcely have worked more differently: prose opposed to verse; the present time and place, rather than historical action or foreign and fantastic settings. In structure, perhaps, the plays are still more obviously different: for Chekhov, a few acts of continuous business, shaped by such simple activities as arrivals and departures, meals, parties, artistic enterprise, courtship, family disputes, estate management, and housekeeping; while in Shakespeare's plays, action is displayed in twenty to forty separate scenes and presents a great variety of incident, commonly involving matters of life and death, or of power and politics, and not infrequently leading to acts of violence, treachery, suffering, and fortitude. When more intimate affairs are involved in Shakespeare, some unusual pressures such as illegality, personal danger or ignorance of one another's identity or sex are commonly supplied to complicate matters and heighten dramatic tension. Crisis, destruction, courage, and deception are found in Chekhov's plays, but the development of these elements is slow and viewed only intermittently; naked presentation is reserved for rare moments.

Yet Chekhov and Shakespeare are close in one very fundamental way, in that they share both vision and technique in the presentation of individual consciousness and existence. This draws the two dramatists together and, with them, British and Russian theatres. Firstly their characters function in mind and body with similar subtlety and strength; and they seem to be in search of a similar inward peace. Their identities are imminent, and not defined by words or constantly apparent. What they are to others is not what they feel themselves to be, and self-consciousness is never expressed easily or completely. The persons in these plays know themselves and each other with only occasional and partial clarity; often what happens to them defines their existence, as if in despite of their conscious minds. What they say of themselves is conditioned by each changing context, and carries a burden of past and present deceptions. They can neither say what they are, nor know what they may be; yet, by the end of the play, a reckoning has been made, through all the varying impressions of words and actions, and, in some ways, in contrast to them. And the smallest character in the plays of both dramatists seems to have been created with the same pragmatic and responsible understanding.

In this respect it may be argued that a knowledge of Chekhov has changed our view of Shakespeare's plays, rather more than the other way round. Only recently has a Shakespeare play taken over four hours to perform because of what the actors have found to do with the words they speak and what is underneath them and between them. Previously performances have been lengthy to accommodate elaborate scene-changes, large ceremonies employing many supernumeraries, or the ornate and impressive delivery of the text by leading actors. But now time is often taken to share the actors' awareness of their characters' personal dilemmas and aspirations, and of previously hidden or unregarded movements of unspoken thoughts. Stanislavsky's notion of a ‘subtext’, developed at the Moscow Art Theatre when Chekhov's plays were its greatest achievement, has given to every actor the intellectual means to discover conflicting intentions and half-conscious awarenesses existing within the words of Shakespeare's text, revealing the mazy and sensitive consciousness with which the dramatist has endowed his principal characters. An actor is now more able to sense the complex individual being whom he or she is invited to apprehend and assimilate into performance. The temptation has arisen to labour for the public's full appreciation of this subtlety, rather than assume that rehearsals have given the actors the ability to dazzle and shine; to create the wonder of character—as the dramatist has done—with almost insensible touches. Chekhov's plays, which depend on the inner reality of their characters to sustain both form and meaning, have encouraged British actors to find a similar inner reality for their characters in Shakespeare. Whether his plays are performed very slowly or with energy and speed, the text and the imitation of life upon the stage have become even more marvellous in consequence.

Over a number of years, critics and dramaturgs have been catching up with what actors and directors have discovered in rehearsals.⁵ It is now understood more widely that Shakespeare's characters encounter each other as fully imagined beings whose speeches hide as well as reveal, so that a few simple words or a silent gesture can suggest deep-seated thoughts and feelings. Because they know that Andrey, in The Three Sisters, expresses a complicated sense of his predicament by saying simply ‘My wife is my wife’, or Chebutykin by singing to himself, while Tuzenbakh actually acknowledges that ‘trifles, such silly little things, sometimes become so important suddenly, for no apparent reason’, and because of countless other examples, actors and critics have come to recognize the importance of similar means—‘silly little things’—provided at crucial moments in Shakespeare's plays, in conjunction with his more usual mode of sustained poetic and rhetorical dialogue.

Some of these moments have long been recognized in the theatre. Shylock's exit from the Trial Scene of The Merchant of Venice, with no verbal means of expressing the depth of his pain, frustration or perseverance, has often provided the strong but silent conclusion for a major performance of the role: as this single man moves through the assembled company, emotions and thoughts have been subtextual for many years before Stanislavsky employed the term. But increasingly, during the last fifty years, many more opportunities of this kind have been discovered and used. The Merchant of Venice has been performed so that it ends with a silent Antonio, alone on the stage, or moving to join the lovers unwillingly, or with forced good humour, after all words have been spoken. More subtly, the few simple words spoken by Jessica (in other company than Lorenzo's and Launcelot's) have served as points of focus to offset the good spirits of the comedy, and sometimes as a reproach to Portia who, in all other ways, seems fully in command of the play's conclusion.

Some unpretentious phrases have proved capable of expressing the heart of Shakespeare's drama, with as much effect as the golden verse which first attracts the attention of actors, directors, and critics. When Hamlet has seen his father's Ghost and has drawn Horatio and his fellow witnesses into his confidence, he concludes the scene with dynamic and explicit words:

                                                                                                    So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you,
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do t'express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!

(Hamlet, I.5.190 ff.)

But after the clinching and conclusive couplet follows an incomplete verse-line: ‘Nay, come, let's go together.’ It was this apparently artless remark which lodged in the memory of Donald Sinden when, as a young actor, he played the Ghost in a touring company led by John Gielgud. He listened nightly to his older colleague, who had acted in some of the earliest British productions of Chekhov, including Michel Saint-Denis' renowned Three Sisters a few years previously in 1938:

I wish I could describe how many facets Gielgud gave to that simple line. (‘Please go with me.’ ‘I don't want to let you out of my sight.’ ‘It would look better if we arrived together.’ ‘Let us leave this awesome place.’ ‘Don't leave me.’) I learned from that one line what infinite possibilities are open to an actor.⁶

Another quality which Chekhov and Shakespeare share, and which makes British actors feel instinctively at home in the Russian plays, is an open-handedness: neither playwright insists upon one way, or one level, of interpretation. Gielgud as Hamlet, disciplined actor though he has always been, could vary the implications of that concluding line from night to night, according to how the scene had developed, changing his Hamlet subtly for each new audience. In Chekhov's plays he had already (in 1925) experienced this freedom: every night he had been the sole judge of the precise manner—the speed, tidiness, confusion, desperation, regret—with which Treplev spends the last two minutes he has on stage tearing up his manuscripts without saying a word. In his last Chekhovian role, as Gayev, he was to decide what happens as he says, at the conclusion of Act 1 of The Cherry Orchard: ‘Coming, coming! Go to bed! In off the cushion! I pot the white!’ Such ‘silly little things’ invite an actor to conclude a performance as seems right to him or her, and so to suggest reactions deeper and more subtle than many words would define.

Perhaps it was a consequence of this shared sense of the inner life of the persons of a drama that neither Shakespeare nor Chekhov was confined by prescriptive ideas of what was suitable for ‘Tragedy’ or ‘Comedy’. They do not present their characters in a sequence of distinctly different modes within a single play, in the manner of more primitive dramas or the dialectical theatre of Bertolt Brecht; rather a freedom from stylistic restraint was theirs from moment to moment. Both dramatists use a play's action to lead their characters through a gamut of reactions towards a culminating ‘moment of truth’ which sums up and revalues earlier impressions; and, in doing this, they both refuse to exclude any kind of response which the characters can encompass. So Shakespeare's ‘comic’ characters—Bottom, Benedick, Beatrice, Rosalind, Falstaff—are more than that word implies; they all draw forth our laughter at the very edge of defeat or pain, and then stop that laughter. And so do Kulygin, Vershinin, Andrey, and Chebutykin. None of these are ‘comic characters’ in any conventional or limiting sense of those words. Even Natasha is possibly capable of awakening laughter, more certainly of becoming ridiculous, as she rises more and more to a position of power.

Similarly, Shakespeare's ‘tragic’ heroes have an irreducible element of the grotesque or absurd in their make-up, often developing into madness or, on one occasion, into ‘valiant fury’. As she kills herself to satisfy ‘immortal longings’—or so she says—Cleopatra thinks of a ‘poor venomous fool’, as if able, in one part of her mind, to share the laughter of the clown who had brought her the means to die; and she seems to take light-hearted pleasure in the thought that great Caesar is ‘an ass unpolicied’. Chekhov's three sisters do not often play or fantasize light-heartedly, but Olga is able to recognize how ‘cheerfully and jauntily that band is playing … so cheerfully and joyfully’. The concluding words ‘If only we knew, if only we knew …’ might, just possibly, reflect upon the cheerful innocence with which baby Bobik sits up now in his pram and surveys the scene, representative of another generation which may wish to ‘know’: if Olga has seen him, so that the audience is encouraged to perceive this contrast, her words might almost raise laughter at the dramatist's contrivance. The shooting incident in Act 3 of Uncle Vanya—‘Missed again!’—is one of the clearest examples of Chekhov's refusal of ordinary categories of tragedy and comedy, and ordinary notions of theatrical decorum.

Perhaps Shakespeare and Chekhov are most obviously alike in their refusal to provide clear answers to the largest problems which are raised by the action of their plays. Should Othello and Desdemona have married? Will Fortinbras be a good ruler of Denmark, and was Hamlet's revenge a noble act that frees all faults? Henry V is shown winning the French crown, but the Chorus is at hand to tell the audience that in his son's reign that realm was lost and England had to bleed for it: so was God to be praised for a great and good victory as the king had declared? Shakespeare left such questions posed but not answered. His comedies show how diverse are the couples which are found ‘coming to the ark’ (As You Like It, V.4.36), but few unions are allowed to be tested by time. The ‘happy’ conclusions of the comedies are seldom effected without the intervention of some strange or even magic circumstance for which the participants can scarcely be held responsible. While many wise words are spoken in the plays, it needs great ingenuity to pluck from them any confident answers to basic questions about human conduct. And so with Chekhov: he was sometimes pressed to pronounce judgement on society and on the characters in his plays, but, like Shakespeare, he did not ‘abide’ such questions, remaining ‘free’. We do not know Shakespeare's response to those who read political or moral certainties in his works, but we do have some of Chekhov's; for example:

You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author … It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference.⁷

III

The assimilation of Chekhov into British theatre, so unlikely in view of its insular resistance to other foreign-language dramatists, may well have proved so easy, pleasurable, and influential in practice because of deep-seated similarities between Shakespeare and Chekhov. Yet the rush to participate has its dangers. The outward differences of language, structure, setting, dialogue, theme, and so forth, are bound to be seen and respected, but, if Chekhov is to contribute fully and grow to his true stature in Britain, other hidden differences—the roots of the tree—must also be sought out, respected, and used when producing the plays.

Where these two dramatists are most alike their root differences will be most significant, because here both are most original and sensitive. In the presentation of the individual persons of their dramas, they seem to have reached the same kind of understanding, and developed similar techniques, but by following totally different paths. For Shakespeare the idea of men and women as actors occurs again and again:

                                                                      All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players …

(As You Like It, II.7.139ff.)

                                                                      What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears …

(Hamlet, II.2.544ff.)

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more …

(Macbeth, V.4.24ff.)

When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.

(Lear, IV.6.179-80)

You have put me now to such a part which never
I shall discharge to th'life.

(Coriolanus, III.3.105-6)

The analogue of the stage haunts this writer's view of persons in action and interaction, in thought, speech, and appearance; and he has given this consciousness to his principal characters. He had been an actor himself and become a ‘motley to the view’ (Sonnet cx), and so the men and women in his plays know both cowardice and ‘pitiful ambition’ as they seek, instinctively, for a ‘truth’ in performance. (Yet ‘The players cannot keep counsel; they'll tell all’: Hamlet, III.2.134-5.) By these means they are also shown seeking satisfaction, delight, peace, freedom, all the possible rewards of acting, as Hamlet details them when the players' arrival is announced in Elsinore:

He that plays the king shall be welcome—his majesty shall have tribute of me—, the adventurous knight shall use his foil and target, the lover shall not sigh gratis, the humorous man shall end his part in peace, the clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickle o'the'sere, and the lady shall say her mind freely …

(Hamlet, II.2.314-19)

Shakespeare's characters have a theatrical uncertainty and a theatrical energy or ambition; together these qualities are at the very basis of his art.

But Chekhov was different. He was a doctor, not an actor: he knew that each day new illness would need attention; he had a sense that this work was never-ending, that his knowledge and ability to respond to obvious need were always inadequate, and that his own health was as precarious as that of his patients. He learnt to observe objectively and in great detail. But he not only practised medicine; as a student he had chosen for his thesis-topic no less a subject than ‘A history of medicine in Russia’. In Chekhov's mind, it seems, the world never shrank to the dimensions of a stage, as in a theatre; but each individual person and each moment were part of a much wider reality and a slow process of change. He distrusted simple solutions, not least that ‘bookish, learned psychology’ which purported to explain what motivated human beings: ‘Knowing [such a psychology] is just about the same as not knowing it, since it is more a fiction than a science, a kind of alchemy, and it is high time for it to be filed away in the archives.’⁸ As a doctor and as an observer of human behaviour, Chekhov seems to have maintained a careful scepticism. To the British translator and dramatist Michael Frayn, the plays show that he had—quite unlike Shakespeare—an objective quality of mind, as if ‘appearing to inhabit his characters, yet standing outside them, being cool about them … People tend to think his characters are warm and lovable. But that's not really how he sees them himself. He is quite distant towards them.’⁹

Chekhov could call himself lazy, but the energy of his mind is remarkable and the variety of its concerns. Scepticism or ‘coolness’ did not lead to inaction. He was prepared to plan, finance, build, and supervize new country schools, to organize famine relief, to conduct hundreds of interviews for a census in a remote convict settlement, and to reorganize and run his own estate. His first published writings of 1880 were humorous articles and short stories, but he was to write hundreds of them, and continued to develop their range and refine his techniques until, in 1889, he abandoned a projected novel. His earlier plays were either rejected or ill-received, but he persisted; and so he reworked and developed much of the material of The Wood Demon for Uncle Vanya, completed some eight years later. Clearly his career as an experimental writer and then as a dramatist, struggling with misunderstanding and inadequate productions, and with appalling ill-health, is in great contrast to Shakespeare's regular output of one or two plays each season for a single company over a period of some twenty years. Moreover Shakespeare was also a poet and not a writer of short prose-fiction: words were forever over-reaching themselves in his mind, leading his imagination onward and becoming ‘wanton’ (Twelfth Night, III.1.14-24). Whereas it is appropriate to speak of the ‘quick forge’ of Shakespeare's creative mind (Henry V, IV.8, Chorus, 23), Chekhov's seems to have had a different temper: more watchful, more practical and persistent; and, in some ways, lighter too.

Perhaps Chekhov was self-aware in a different way from Shakespeare. Gorky's reminiscence of a visit to the older dramatist's house at Kuchuk-Koy gives a vivid impression of his host's ‘animation’ as he talked about school teachers and the need to provide very practically for their intellectual and personal well-being, but he also tells of Chekhov's sudden unease and smile. He judged that it was characteristic of him to speak ‘so earnestly, with such warmth and sincerity, and then suddenly to laugh at himself and his speech’.¹⁰

The briefest and most selective consideration of how Chekhov's mind was formed, and of how it worked, shows that it was not at all like Shakespeare's. While recognizing the intimate kinship between the works of the two dramatists and the ease with which Chekhov has become assimilated into British theatre, the differences between them in the nature of their creative minds should also be sought out and taken into account. In the process of making Chekhov's plays their own, directors, designers, and actors need to take time to become aware of the roots of his imagination.

Chekhov's own letters and short stories are the principal sources for this study, and then memoirs, letters, and other writings by his close friends and associates. Beyond that, enquiry will need to discover a great deal about Russia, the land and its resources, its climate, society, economy, history, culture, theatres. Chekhov's curiosity fed upon many kinds of observation, so that to follow where his mind leads is to become involved in a fine and complex web of lived experience—some threads old and others very new, some strong and some weak, some firmly in place and others insecure.

Returning from such an enquiry to the plays themselves, the question will arise as to whether a production in which the characters seem trapped is a suitable response to the text, or one which is lively and argumentative, or dynamic and explosive. Is it helpful if the characters appear to be acting a role? Is an ‘ensemble’, in which every actor knows each other, the best kind of company to stage the plays? All these approaches have proved rewarding—Chekhov's popularity in Britain proves this—but perhaps there is more to discover within the texts by respecting the less obvious differences from the plays on which our tastes have been formed. Might a production be created which was, in some way, more speculative, more variously enlivened and, finally, more inscrutable? While reinterpreting the plays for the present time and place, how closely can directors be attuned to Chekhov's imaginative processes? How far can audiences share the view of the world which was in his mind's eye?

Notes

1. See Peter Hall's Diaries, ed. John Goodwin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), pp. 331-7.

2. Patrick Miles, Chekhov on the British Stage, 1909-1987 (Cambridge: Sam and Sam, 1987), p. 39.

3. ‘Wild flowers, wild bees, wild honey’, Drama, 1984, April, p. 5.

4. Ibid.

5. See, for example, Una Ellis-Fermor, ‘The revelation of unspoken thought in drama’, The Frontiers of Drama (London: Methuen, 1945), pp. 96-126, and Shakespeare the Dramatist (London: Methuen, 1961), especially pp. 21-52; John Russell Brown, ‘Shakespeare's subtext, I & II’, Tulane Drama Review, 8:1 and 2 (1963), pp. 72-94 and 85-102; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1976), especially ch. 2, ‘Impressions of character’, and ch. 6, ‘Secret motives in Othello’, and Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

6. Donald Sinden, A Touch of the Memoirs (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982), p. 61.

7. Letters of Anton Chekhov, trans. M. H. Heim (New York, London, etc.: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 171.

8. Ibid., p. 143.

9. ‘Under the sisters' skin’ (an interview), The Guardian, 23 March 1987.

10. The Note-Books of Anton Tchekhov, together with Reminiscences of Tchekhov by Maxim Gorky, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1921), pp. 91-3.