This is not Chekhov! – Weekend

5K 15 min.

Theater has a paradoxical relationship with time. The theater has nothing and nowhere to become obsolete, its work is not a storage unit and does not live in time: it begins and ends in one evening, it has no state other than today. The performance is on today, tomorrow it will be different. The theater does not preserve the past, it plays with it. Invading the classical text, modern theater enters into a dialogue with it, which can be deep or superficial, witty or flat, aggressive or friendly. What are the features and properties of this dialogue? Or, to put it another way: how and why does theater encroach on the author?

Photo: Judith Buss

Text: Olga Fedyanina

Interpreting the classics, the theater causes constant excitement - partly enthusiastic, partly irritated. Those who come to the theater for Chekhov, Shakespeare, Gogol, Verdi, and find in it Wilson, Brook, Mitchell, Serebrennikov, Chernyakov, are irritated - for the second century now.

To the cry of “this is not Chekhov!” (Shakespeare, Gorky) there are two possible answers. The first is “so what?” The second is “exactly like Chekhov” (Shakespeare, Gorky). Art even allows for the simultaneous existence of both options, which are generally mutually exclusive. And the sacramental “this is not...” is not initially a censoring cry, but a voiced reflection on the nature and meaning of any art. The sign and manifesto of this reflection was created by Rene Magritte almost 90 years ago. A thing that has changed its habitat cannot remain equal to itself, be it a pipe that has become a painting, or a play that has become a performance. (And that dusty Chekhov in the 1973 Soviet television recording, whom others consider the standard, is in fact exactly the same “non-Czech” as the one that the most radical reformers of the stage offer you.) Theater is the most dialectical of the arts, which affirmation and negation extracts its energy, and the methods of such extraction are varied.

present instead of past

The most noticeable thing, as often happens, is the most insignificant. You came to see “Three Sisters”, and there Vershinin explains his love to Masha in text messages, in “The Merchant of Venice” the merchants are in office suits, in “Woe from Wit” Famusov’s Moscow is lined with Sobyanin’s tiles. Exactly this or something similar happens in hundreds of outstanding performances and in thousands of mediocre ones - and they are never outstanding or mediocre only because this is what happens there.

In most cases, the theater brings the time on stage closer to the time in the stalls for a very simple reason. Neither Gorky, nor Chekhov, nor Strindberg, nor Ostrovsky wrote plays set 100 or 150 years ago. If the theater wants to remain in the artistic time of the author, which is implied or directly stated as “our days,” it must leave his actual time and go to the actual time of the auditorium. The consequences can be extremely varied.

For example:

The Merchant of Venice, directed by Peter Zadek, Berliner Ensemble, 1990

Photo: Marc Enguerand

Peter Zadek made his version of Shakespeare's play, already being, so to speak, a classic of European theatrical radicalism. The director did not rethink the play, he literally “re-dressed” it. Everything that happened in Shakespeare's Venice can happen today on the New York Stock Exchange, Zadek said, and this is what his performance was dedicated to. Shylock's conflict with the Venetian merchant Antonio played out in the tone of the film Wall Street, which Zadek quite deliberately quoted. The stockbrokers, a pack of boring gray people in gray suits and white shirts, pronounced Shakespeare's texts like stock reports - and the dryness of this recitation not only did not kill the text, but only emphasized its tension.

Main characters of the play

Main characters:

Three Prozorov sisters: Olga, Masha, Irina.
Prozorov Andrey Sergeevich is the brother of three sisters.
Natalya Ivanovna, bride, then wife of Prozorov.

Other characters:

Kulygin Fyodor Ilyich, gymnasium teacher, Masha’s husband.
Vershinin Alexander Ignatievich, lieutenant colonel, battery commander.
Tuzenbakh Nikolai Lvovich, baron, lieutenant.
Solyony Vasily Vasilievich, staff captain.
Chebutykin Ivan Romanovich, military doctor.
Fedotik Alexey Petrovich, second lieutenant.
Rode Vladimir Karpovich, second lieutenant.
Ferapont, a watchman from the zemstvo council, an old man.
Anfisa, nanny, old woman, 80 years old.

incomplete instead of whole

In addition to constructors, there are also deconstructors in the modern theater. For whom artistic reality does not at all resemble a slender, majestic building, where all parts are proportional to each other and their purpose. For deconstructors, preserving the dramatic plot is simply contrary to evidence and the modern worldview. This is theater that is as little narrative as the modernist novel, because the modern world is also no longer narrative in the classical sense. In this anti-narrative world, the classic plot hierarchy, in which there is a main character, there are secondary characters, there are episodic characters, there are extras, and they all respectively receive their decreasing share of the audience and director’s attention, looks archaic.

The deconstructing gaze shifts proportions and angles and is always ready to take a fragment for the whole, because “why is there a whole virgin, since there is a knee.” Or, as Mitya Karamazov says, “Grushenka, the rogue, has one such bend.” Today's director's eye often looks for and finds in a classical text precisely a “bend,” one feature, a collection of subtle twists. Integrity is false, fragmentation is natural, any rigid cause-and-effect relationships are naive - modern consciousness sees the world much better with a compound eye. That is why, by the way, such a deconstructing view prefers prose rather than drama in the theater - Dostoevsky’s novel obviously does not fit into the stage framework, leaving the director the freedom to choose motives and angles. Often these perspectives and motives belong to episodic characters, almost strangers. The “whole” story remains behind the scenes - we look at it through the half-open door through the eyes of a random passerby. In this theater of anti-construction and anti-hierarchy, the classical text plays the role of a vague memory of a lost whole.

For example:

"Christine", directed by Katie Mitchell, Schaubühne, 2010

Photo: Stephen Cummiskey

Mitchell dramatizes Strindberg's Miss Julie, as if completely bypassing its plot - the story of a short tragic duel of passions and desires, which plays out between a rich heiress, almost a teenager Julie, and her father's footman Jean, shown through the eyes of a minor character, Jean's fiancée Christina. The angles and possibilities of this look are thoroughly verified and emphasized by the main formal device of the performance: Mitchell combines theater and cinema on stage, Christina’s gaze connects with the camera’s gaze, and the “film” that she sees from her nooks and corners emerges as a result of online editing on the screen above the stage. The intensity of the impression from this story, consisting of fragmentary scenes and fragments of dialogue, turned out to be quite comparable to any Hollywood horror.

Contents of the play “Three Sisters” with quotes

The action takes place in the provincial town, in the house of the Prozorovs.

Irina, the youngest of the three Prozorov sisters, turns twenty years old. “It’s sunny and fun outside,” and a table is being set in the hall to await guests—officers of the artillery battery stationed in the city and its new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Vershinin. Everyone is full of joyful expectations and hopes. Irina: “I don’t know why my soul is so light... It’s like I’m on sails, there’s a wide blue sky above me and big white birds are flying around.” The Prozorovs are scheduled to move to Moscow in the fall.

The sisters have no doubt that their brother Andrei will go to university and eventually become a professor. Kulygin, a gymnasium teacher, the husband of one of the sisters, Masha, is grateful. Chebutykin, a military doctor who once madly loved the Prozorovs’ late mother, succumbs to the general joyful mood. “My white bird,” he kisses Irina touchingly. Lieutenant Baron Tuzenbach speaks with enthusiasm about the future: “The time has come […] a healthy, strong storm is being prepared, which […] will blow away laziness, indifference, prejudice towards work, rotten boredom from our society.”

Vershinin is equally optimistic. With his appearance, Masha’s “merechlyundia” goes away. The atmosphere of relaxed cheerfulness is not disturbed by the appearance of Natasha, although she herself is terribly embarrassed by large society. Andrei proposes to her: “Oh youth, wonderful, wonderful youth! […] I feel so good, my soul is full of love, delight... My dear, good, pure, be my wife!”

But already in the second act, major notes are replaced by minor ones. Andrey can't find a place for himself because of boredom. He, who dreamed of a professorship in Moscow, is not at all attracted by the position of secretary of the zemstvo government, and in the city he feels “alien and lonely.” Masha is finally disappointed in her husband, who once seemed to her “terribly learned, smart and important,” and among his fellow teachers she simply suffers. Irina is not satisfied with her work at the telegraph office: “What I so wanted, what I dreamed about, is not in it. Work without poetry, without thoughts...” Olga returns from the gymnasium, tired and with a headache.

Not in the spirit of Vershinin. He still continues to assure that “everything on earth must change little by little,” but he immediately adds: “And how I would like to prove to you that there is no happiness, there should not be and there will not be for us... We must only work and work..." In Chebutykin's puns, with which he amuses those around him, hidden pain breaks through: "No matter how you philosophize, loneliness is a terrible thing..."

Natasha, who is gradually taking control of the whole house, sends out the guests who were waiting for the mummers. "Philistine!" - Masha says to Irina in her hearts.

Three years have passed. If the first act took place at noon, and it was “sunny and cheerful” outside, then the stage directions for the third act “warn” about completely different - gloomy, sad - events: “Behind the stage they sound the alarm bell on the occasion of a fire that started a long time ago. Through the open door you can see a window, red from the glow.” The Prozorovs' house is full of people fleeing the fire.

Irina sobs: “Where? Where did it all go? […] and life is leaving and will never return, we will never, never go to Moscow... I’m in despair, I’m in despair!”

Masha thinks in alarm: “Somehow we will live our lives, what will become of us?”

Andrey cries: “When I got married, I thought that we would be happy... everyone is happy... But my God...”.

Tuzenbach, perhaps, is even more disappointed: “What a happy life I imagined then (three years ago - V.B.)! Where is she?".

While on a drinking binge, Chebutykin: “My head is empty, my soul is cold. Maybe I’m not a person, but I’m only pretending that I have arms and legs... and a head; Maybe I don’t exist at all, but it only seems to me that I walk, eat, sleep. (Crying.)"

And the more persistently Kulygin repeats: “I am satisfied, I am satisfied, I am satisfied,” the more obvious it becomes how broken and unhappy everyone is.

And finally, the last action. Autumn is approaching. Masha, walking along the alley, looks up: “And migratory birds are already flying…” The artillery brigade leaves the city: it is transferred to another place, either to Poland, or to Chita. The officers come to say goodbye to the Prozorovs. Fedotik, taking a photograph as a souvenir, notes: “...there will be peace and quiet in the city.” Tuzenbach adds: “And the boredom is terrible.” Andrey speaks out even more categorically: “The city will be empty. It’s as if they’ll cover him with a cap.”

Masha breaks up with Vershinin, whom she fell in love with so passionately: “Unsuccessful life... I don’t need anything now...” Olga, having become the head of the gymnasium, understands: “That means she won’t be in Moscow.” Irina decided - “if I’m not destined to be in Moscow, then so be it” - to accept the proposal of Tuzenbach, who retired: “The baron and I are getting married tomorrow, tomorrow we’re leaving for the brick factory, and the day after tomorrow I’m already at school, a new one begins life. […] And suddenly, as if wings grew on my soul, I became cheerful, it became a lot easier and again I wanted to work, work...” Chebutykin in emotion: “Fly, my dears, fly with God!”

He blesses Andrei in his own way for the “flight”: “You know, put on your hat, pick up a stick and go away... leave and go, go without looking back. And the further you go, the better.”

But even the most modest hopes of the characters in the play are not destined to come true. Solyony, in love with Irina, provokes a quarrel with the baron and kills him in a duel. Broken Andrey does not have enough strength to follow Chebutykin’s advice and pick up the “staff”: “Why do we, having barely begun to live, become boring, gray, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy...”

The battery leaves the city. A military march sounds. Olga: “The music plays so cheerfully, cheerfully, and you want to live! […] and, it seems, a little more, and we will find out why we live, why we suffer... If only we knew! (The music plays quieter and quieter.) If only I had known, if only I had known!” (A curtain.)

The heroes of the play are not free migratory birds, they are imprisoned in a strong social “cage”, and the personal destinies of everyone caught in it are subject to the laws by which the entire country, which is experiencing general trouble, lives. Not “who?”, but “what?” dominates a person. This main culprit of misfortunes and failures in the play has several names - “vulgarity”, “baseness”, “sinful life”...

The face of this “vulgarity” looks especially visible and unsightly in Andrei’s thoughts: “Our city has existed for two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, and not a single one who is not like the others... […] They only eat, drink, sleep, then they die... others will be born, and they also eat, drink, sleep and, in order not to become dull from boredom, they diversify their lives with nasty gossip, vodka, cards, litigation...”

compound instead of reproduced

A kind of complementary opposite to the games of deconstructors is directorial combinatorics. This is the same facet vision, only it is directed not at one literary work, but at the entire universe at once. And this is a theater for which one thing is always too little - it selects its twists and fragments from the entire volume of available texts. If historical “modernization” tests the present day for compliance with classical collisions and divergence from them, then in the theater of universal fragments there is a heightened sense of connection “everything with everything”: here novels, dramas, philosophical treatises and newspaper editorials meet each other, European drama is united with Eastern music theory, real people enter into dialogue with literary characters. The individuality of the theatre, its participation in the dialogue, is manifested in what kind of participants it releases into this discussion ring. This theater presents us with the universe as a single space in which more or less chaotic complexity reigns, where there is no division between reality and fiction, between the dead and the living. Such complexity, by the way, is often fraught with trouble for the theater - figures and words released from genre cages can have a completely unexpected provocative effect. (Just a few weeks ago, the Moscow Army Theater had to put out a scandal that arose due to the fact that a young director combined Raskolnikov’s text and a documentary text belonging to a real murderer in a character’s monologue. This is just the most recent, but not at all the loudest case.)

For example:

“Baal”, director Frank Castorf, Residenztheater, 2015

Photo: Thomas Aurin

Brecht's early play is an ambiguous hymn to the man of the New Age, who is ready to forcibly subjugate the whole world to himself, because he feels real, alive only in extremes and excesses. There is a lot of sarcasm and romantic expressionism in this portrait: Brecht was not only young, but also had just survived the First World War, which he considered an apocalyptic catastrophe. A hundred years later, director Castorf retains Brechtian sarcasm, but gives his romanticism a rather dark account, recreating a picture of a world gripped by the thirst for colonization. And for this, Brecht alone is not enough for him. Castorf's Baal is an American soldier in Vietnam, inheriting all the massacres of the century, and his monologues are interrupted by Sartre's journalistic texts, long visual quotes from Coppola's Apocalypse, and even an operatic aria from Madama Butterfly, which here becomes a kind of concentrate of colonial discourse. The performance provoked one of the few truly high-profile scandals in the German theater, which in fact almost never limits the director’s creative freedom: Brecht’s heirs sued the director for distorting the classics, and “Baal” was removed from the Residenztheater’s repertoire after several impressions The next time Castorf turned to anti-colonial themes, he wisely chose Faust, the rights protection of which had long since expired.

Chekhov "Three Sisters" very brief summary

Summary of The Three Chekhov Sisters for a reader's diary:

The play begins on a sunny day, the sisters are waiting for guests. Everyone is on an emotional high, everyone believes in a bright future, hopes for the best. In addition, the family is going to move to Moscow, and there are new bright prospects there.

But their usual life doesn’t seem to let them in. Already by the middle of the play, the mood of the characters, and even the situation itself, changes, reflecting their emotional state. Bad weather, evening, fire, people around are terrified... The heroes themselves suffer. Everyone is unhappy with their situation.

Dissatisfaction is intensified by the fact that their beautiful dreams contrast too much with the terrible reality. Irina’s job turns out to be mechanical and uninteresting, it’s impossible to find another one, and studying constantly gives her a headache. Maria's family life becomes unbearable, her husband and his friends disgust her.

The sisters have a feeling that their lives have gone somewhere; they, like many people, see a way out in moving. Change of place of residence, new acquaintances and opportunities... And of course, they are still striving for the capital. Even their brother (a man) weeps, mourning his hopes, saying that he got married three years ago and thought that he would be happy, but he was mistaken.

Then autumn comes, everything becomes even sadder. In addition, the artillery brigade, which at least slightly brightened up the life of the sisters with its company, is transferred somewhere abroad. The heroes also have to fight terrible boredom - melancholy.

Maria has to part with her lover, who must leave with the brigade. In despair, Masha calls her entire life “unsuccessful.” The eldest Olga heads the gymnasium and understands that she needs to say goodbye to the dream of Moscow.

Understanding these sentiments, Irina accepts the proposal of the elderly baron and prepares to become his wife. But this thread also breaks, because the baron is killed by her admirer in a duel. Brother Andrei, who wanted to leave his disgusted wife, cannot do this... due to mental weakness. Not the lives of the heroes, but they themselves become gray without passing the tests of fate.

paraphrased instead of literal

The most deceptive type of modern theatrical expression is one in which the classical text seems to cease to be an object of attention and interest altogether. These are productions in which the text, and with it the plot, are more or less dissolved in mise-en-scène, scenography, stage gesture and plasticity, a kind of “ballet of stage metaphors.” In fact, such theater can be much more attentive to the author than any literal production that hangs on every word of the original. But it is made by directors (usually in close and important collaboration with set designers) with a highly developed sense of how great the difference in type is between the verbal and the performative in art. “I would hug you, but I’m just a text” was the title of a work by artist Timofey Radi at an exhibition in 2014, with the slogan “This is not a Book” alluding to Magritte. If a change of environment is not a formal, but an ontological artistic problem, then all the heroes of world drama (and literature in general) are only text, a two-dimensional graphic composition that appeals to the reader’s imagination. And transferring it to the stage cannot at all be equal to pronouncing this text out loud. Theater builds a three-dimensional world that reifies the author and ceases his existence as a text. Sometimes this reification creates a single monolithic sign, a general metaphor for the entire play (or the entire novel, or even the entire author), and sometimes a series of such metaphors, taking on the functions of the plot. By the way, unlike all the others, the metaphorical theater is inclined to be seriously offended by the reproach “this is not Chekhov”, “this is not Kafka”, “this is not Shakespeare” - because its important ambition always remains precisely the embodiment of the “author” as a new theatrical reality.

For example:

“The Magic Mountain”, director Konstantin Bogomolov, Electrotheatre “Stanislavsky”, 2017

Photo: Olympia Orlova

Konstantin Bogomolov's novel by Thomas Mann was turned into a performance that lasts 1 hour and 20 minutes and which least of all makes sense to reproach that “this is not Mann.” This is just Mann, reduced to an audiovisual sign, a conceptual image. The space created by set designer Larisa Lomakina, at the same time extremely beautiful and very repulsive, is a giant “box”, all the walls of which seem to be occupied by a colony of bacteria enlarged by an electron microscope. Acoustically, the performance is dominated by all the modulations of coughing, which replaces the dialogue in the first half of the performance; in the second half, short stories of dying are added to the coughing, corresponding to different seasons, a kind of landscape lyricism of death. The sanatorium imprisonment of Hans Castorp in Bogomolov’s play is concentrated into an installation in which there is no author’s text, but it itself is, of course, a product of this text, its theatrical echo - or ghost.

Lermontov complexes

Chebutykin and Soleny (Sergey Kachanov - Chebutykin, Alexander Medvedev - Soleny - editor's note). Many people put them directly when you think that in life it doesn’t happen that a person sits and argues for so long or behaves so openly defiantly. And here the explanation is simple - they are drunk, and they also want to speak out, to speak out, and they cannot stop... And Soleny has terrible complexes, like Lermontov. He considered himself ugly, his character was bilious and monstrous. He couldn’t control himself, his psychophysical complexes pushed him out, only then did he begin to figure out what he was doing. And he was carried away, carried away... It was the same in Solenye. The artist Alexander Medvedev played the key scene with Irina very well: “I love you.” If she had said in response: I understand you, but I love someone else... And she pushed him away, it’s the same as spitting in his eyes in front of everyone. And again there is a flash of anger...

All life in the Three Sisters remained behind the birch trees. Photo: Alexander Ivanishin

continued instead of stopped

What exactly does the sacramental “you can’t write better than Chekhov” mean if you don’t listen to the implied quarrelsome intonation? It’s scary to say that the time for dramatic masterpieces is over. But this only sounds uncomfortable, but in fact there is nothing special about it. In the history of theater there was an era of playwrights, and it has its own historical extent. Ninety percent of the “eternal” plays walking on the stages of the world come from this era. Which begins, if we greatly coarse and round it, approximately with Shakespeare, and ends approximately with Pirandello. And if you don’t take risks and don’t take specific names, then from the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 20th century. Four centuries is a long story, but not an eternity. And this story has already ended for about half a century - or, let’s say, continues to end. The absence of a modern Chekhov is not a fact of theater history, not evidence of collective talent or mediocrity, but a fact of anthropology. It's not about the theater, it's about us. Plot, action, dialogue, character, type told something significant about the world and man for four centuries, and then stopped. And from that time on, the classical play itself turns into play material, valuable and great. We still recognize ourselves in the patterns of this matter and continue to study the structure of the Universe and man from it, but in our relationship with it, whether we want it or not, there is always a distance of varying complexity. Modern theater turns to classical texts in order to cover this distance again and again, with a new outcome and along a new trajectory. A modern performance is a trajectory, a route, not a stop.

A short retelling of Chekhov's "Three Sisters"

The Three Chekhov Sisters summary:

The play takes place in a provincial town in the Prozorov family. The Prozorov family consists of three sisters - Olga, Masha and Irina - and their brother Andrey. The eldest Olga is 28 years old; the youngest Irina is 20 years old. The Prozorovs were born and raised in Moscow into a wealthy noble family, but for 11 years they have been living in the provinces, where their late father brought them.

The three sisters do not feel happy and complain that they are too educated for this town. Irina and Olga want to return to Moscow. Masha is unlikely to move to Moscow, since she is married to a local teacher, Kulygin. Officers often visit the Prozorovs' house: Baron Tuzenbach, Colonel Vershinin, Staff Captain Soleny, doctor Chebutykin, etc.

The eldest of the sisters, Olga, works as a teacher in a gymnasium. She is not married. The younger Irina is also not married. Officers Tuzenbach and Solyony are unrequitedly in love with her. Irina wants to work: it seems to her that work will make her happy. Masha is also dissatisfied with her life and her husband Kulygin, a kind but not very smart man. Masha cheats on her husband with Colonel Vershinin, who is also married.

Andrei Prozorov is in love with a local girl, Natalya Ivanovna. He proposes to her and soon the heroes get married and have a son and daughter. Modest Natalya turns into a domineering and rude lady. Gradually she behaves like the main mistress of the house. The three sisters, who are also mistresses of the common house, do not like this. Andrey is unhappy with his wife Natasha. He feels lonely and misses Moscow. Andrey dreams of becoming a scientist and professor at a university in Moscow, but in the end he gets a job as a minor official.

After 1–2 years, Irina gets a job at a telegraph office. However, this “work without poetry” does not make her happier. Irina and Olga still dream of moving to Moscow and are planning a move, but in reality they are doing nothing. Irina quits the telegraph office and gets a job at the government office. At the same time, she despises her work. Irina agrees to marry Baron Tuzenbach, who has been courting her for a long time. The girl does not love Tuzenbach, but decides to become his wife because he is a good person.

After another 1–2 years, Olga becomes the head of the gymnasium. She understands that she and Irina are unlikely to be able to move to Moscow. Meanwhile, Andrey is addicted to playing cards and loses a lot of money. Natalya cheats on him with his boss Protopopov. Andrei himself pretends not to notice his wife’s infidelity. Gradually, Andrei comes to terms with life in the provinces and no longer aspires to become a professor in Moscow. He considers his life and the lives of his sisters to be unsuccessful.

Suddenly, Colonel Vershinin and other officers leave the city to serve elsewhere. As a result, the Prozorovs are left without their social circle, which saved them from boredom. Masha says goodbye to her lover Vershinin with tears. Kulygin knows about Masha’s betrayals, but does not reproach her and simply rejoices at Vershinin’s departure.

Irina and Baron Tuzenbach are going to get married and go to work together at a brick factory. On the eve of the wedding, Tuzenbach has a conflict with Solyony, who has been behaving provocatively for a long time. The men meet in a duel, in which Tuzenbach dies. Three sisters are sad and console each other. They come to the conclusion that after all, life is not over and they need to live on, no matter what.

This is interesting: Chekhov wrote the story “The Lady with the Dog” in 1898. On our website you can read a summary of “The Lady with the Dog” chapter by chapter to prepare for a literature lesson or test. The work is based on autobiographical circumstances from the writer’s life - a trip to Yalta and a meeting with his last love O. Knipper.