Where Have You Gone, Uncle Vanya?

This is a considerably longer version of a column I wrote for the end of August, which was postponed due to space considerations until the Sept. 6 North Coast Journal.  But since the new theatre season is getting started by then, I thought I'd post this now, the traditional last weekend of summer.

As the 2011-12 theatrical season was ending, I took the opportunity to set aside the year's musicals, contemporary comedies and clown shows, for some different theatrical experiences.  Unfortunately my travel budget doesn’t even extend to Oregon, so I must bring contrasting productions home, where I can travel in time as well as space.

My interlude started when I ran across a movie version of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov on Turner Classic Movies. Featuring a young Vanessa Redgrave and David Warner, and James Mason in his prime, it is a luminous film directed in 1968 by Sidney Lumet. More famous for such movies as Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The Verdict, Lumet also made definitive film versions of a number of plays, including O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh, as well as 12 Angry Men and Equus.  Still, he regarded this as his best film (the TCM introducer said.)  TCM seems to be the only place it's available.

This prompted a kind of longing, especially when I realized that I hadn’t seen a Chekhov play ever on the North Coast, nor given the present configurations and situations of theatres here, is it ever likely I will. I checked around, and nobody could remember one here for maybe 25 years. Director, actor and professor James Floss recalled Pacific Art Center Theatre productions of The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters (with Terry Desch, Toodie Dodgen and Bonnie Bareilles,) both decades ago.

  It doesn’t take long for conversations with veteran North Coast actors to turn to the late lamented Pacific Art Center Theatre. It’s clear now that it left a niche in the local stage ecology that’s never been filled, not just for Chekhov but an array of classic modern playwrights.

I’ve seen Three Sisters on stage at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, and two productions of The Cherry Orchard: one by Bulgarian-born director Mladen Kiselov at Carnegie Mellon University, and one at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2007, directed by Libby Appel, who did The Seagull at OSF this season.  I also was dramaturg for a production of several of Chekhov's short plays, directed by Margaret Thomas Kelso at a small college in central Pennsylvania where she taught before coming to HSU.

But the Chekhov play that grabbed me this summer was Uncle Vanya. Coincidentally (I later discovered on the Internet) there were two productions of Uncle Vanya in New York City this year, including a much-praised one at Lincoln Center featuring the film star Cate Blanchett, produced by her theatre company. Insert Chekhovian sigh here.

  My explorations were instead via DVD and VHS. I started with August, the 1996 film directed by and starring Anthony Hopkins. It transposes Uncle Vanya to Hopkins’ native Wales, pretty much intact. (It features Kate Burton, daughter of another famous Welsh actor, Richard Burton.) Outside the Russian milieu but in a corresponding context, it illuminates aspects of the play more sharply for English and American audiences. (Hopkins also composed the music.)

Next was Vanya on 42nd Street, the 1994 Louis Malle film of a production directed by Andre Gregory, starring Wallace Shawn (reuniting the trio that did the cult favorite My Dinner With Andre) and Julianne Moore, with lovely performances by Brooke Smith, Larry Pine, George Gaynes and Phoebe Brand.

The conceit here is that we’re witnessing a group of actors who’ve been exploring the play for many months in an abandoned old theatre. It starts with them arriving for a run-through, chatting with a few invited audience members, then with each other. And eventually you realize that this chat has actually become Chekhov—the play has started. Actor Peter Ustinov remarked that Chekhov’s characters are so self-absorbed that they don’t really relate to each other, and so the actors are all soloists. But in this intimate and low-keyed version, the actors and their characters do relate dramatically, even beyond a New York manner of exchanging accounts of their obsessions. It's a little like Chekhov as a Woody Allen movie.

This Vanya uses the adaptation by playwright David Mamet, as does a 1991 BBC version with Ian Holm, David Warner and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio which I’ve watched several times. Mamet gave the late 19th century dialogue a contemporary cadence, sharpening the humor and at times seemingly highlighting the relevance.  It's apparently the thing to do to use a new translation or version for a new production of any Chekhov, and a number of notable playwrights have done one or more versions, including Tom Stoppard.  Both Stoppard and Mamet have apparently done The Cherry Orchard, though I've seen or read neither.  (Stoppard's The Sea Gull is published in his collected works.)

The most startling contemporary relevance in Mamet's Uncle Vanya, is a speech by Doctor Astrov, who is passionately committed to saving the disappearing forest, partly because it moderates the climate:

“We have destroyed the forest, our rivers run dry, our wildlife is all but extinct, our climate ruined...but I pass by the woods I’ve saved from the ax. I hear the forest sighing...I planted that forest. And I think: perhaps things may be in our power. Perhaps the climate itself is in our control.”

It's startling of course because Chekhov was writing in the late 19th century, and people in our century are facing the consequences of ignoring even contemporary warnings.  But in the context of the play, it especially emphasizes for us now the themes of  dashed potential and waste throughout this play, and other Chekhov plays.  It also reflects Chekhov's including the future in the thoughts of a character in several plays.

So why multiple Vanyas, one after the other? Besides seeing and hearing how each of these great actors play these roles, there’s the experience of structure—not in the way directors may analyze it, but more like the way actors feel it. Acting in the same play multiple times in a run provides a unique sense of the play’s structure. Actors may see the play from their character’s point of view, but they experience the rhythm of it through their actions, their entrances and exits, and even where they take breaths. The structure of a Chekhov play in particular is difficult to absorb in a single performance, but it’s there. 

In 1958, the Moscow Art Theatre--originally, Stanislavsky's theatre that made Chekhov's plays famous--brought three of their latest Chekhov productions to London, where the great Kenneth Tynan reviewed them.  In considering the character of Uncle Vanya, Tynan zeroes in on his dignity.  "He clings to it even in the shooting spree, which becomes in its mad way a matter of honour, an assertion of principle rather than a display of temperament; and in tenacity like this there is a kind of heroism."  The actor's characterization in this production reminds Tynan of Don Quixote.  "This Vanya always looks capable of tragedy; his tragedy is that he is capable only of comedy."  This sense of Vanya does come out in these productions, particularly as played by Anthony Hopkins.

This Mamet version with Ian Holm is included in The Anton Chekhov Collection from the BBC, a multiple DVD set I've had on my Wish List for awhile and finally broke down and bought for myself.  There's also a 1970 production with Anthony Hopkins as Doctor Astrov, as well as a 1974 production of The Wood Demon, with Ian Holm.  This is an early version of Uncle Vanya with a lot of the same dialogue but very different structure.

There's something of a premiere here as well, of Chekhov's first known play, never produced in his lifetime.  Here it's called Platonov, starring Rex Harrison, broadcast in 1971.  It's long for Chekhov but much shorter than his original manuscript.  He wrote it in his 20s, about a kind of Russian provincial Don Juan.

There are several of Chekhov's early short comedies, including a one-act farce (The Wedding), in an English version by Eric Bentley.  Chekhov began as a writer of comic and satirical pieces for various periodicals, only gradually developing into the classic short story writer that made his literary reputation in Russia, and eventually worldwide. 

The first of Chekhov's great plays is The Seagull, represented here in a 1978 production, featuring Michael Gambon, Georgina Hale, Zoe Caldwell and Stephen Rea.  The ironies involved in Chekhov's experience with this play rival anything he wrote for the stage.  Early in this play, the son of a famous actress is staging an outdoor production of a play he's written, in revolt against the established theatre of his mother, and in favor of "new forms" for the future.  (This is a particularly effective scene in the Lumet movie, because Lumet could stage the outdoor scenes really outdoors.  This play within the play has the lake behind the country house as its backdrop, and Lumet shows us what this really looks like, with a makeshift stage in front of a real lake at sunset.)

But Chekhov's own new form of theatre had to undergo a year of struggle with official censors before it could be produced.  Then it opened with a theatre party celebrating a famous older actress who was not unlike the famous older actress in the play.  All her friends came, probably expecting to see her in the play.  But she wasn't, and it wasn't the kind of play she would have been in, or they were used to seeing.  So opening night was a disaster, and the production never recovered.  Chekhov vowed to give up the theatre forever.

But the Stanislavsky production two years later was a great success, and so Chekhov took another look at the manuscript for The Wood Demon, and quickly turned it into Uncle Vanya.

In this collection there's a 1970 production of Three Sisters with Eileen Atkins, Janet Suzman and Michele Dotrice (and I have another, an Actors Studio production, on VHS.)  There are two versions of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov's last play. He died of tuberculosis not long after it opened in 1904, at the age of 44.  This play in particular has been interpreted in many ways.  The BBC collection has a 1962 production with John Gielgud, who also did the translation.  It also features a very young Judi Dench.  The 1981 production stars Judi Dench in a different part, and it won her several awards.

I ran across this paragraph about that 1962 production, which like several of these BBC television versions, was first done on stage.  It's about John Gielgud. " During The Cherry Orchard he became a kind of father-figure to some of the younger actors. Judi Dench had been bullied and mocked by [director] Saint-Denis in rehearsal, and was extremely nervous on the first night. As she prepared to go on again after the first act, Gielgud told her: 'If you had been doing that for me I'd be delighted.' From that moment she played it for him, and settled into the role. Dorothy Tutin also remembers his warmth: 'John was very sweet with Judi and me on stage, the way he put his arms around us, the way he looked at us, always in tears. Although he wasn't usually a physical actor, he was with us, he looked upon and treated us as children, and it was easy to nestle up to him and put your head on his shoulder.' "     The next time I watch this, I'll be thinking of this observation.

This collection also includes the dramatization of a Chekhov short story starring Patrick Stewart, and a few radio plays and short story readings.  So at least the year ahead will not lack Chekhov (or Shaw--I just got his BBC collection), if only on my screens.

Clear on Lear

King Lear is an un-actable part that actors need to play. If playing Hamlet defines a classical actor's career, then playing Lear is the natural challenge to cap that career. Lots of actors have done both. Laurence Olivier made the first modern film of Hamlet and probably still the most famous, though he may have been a bit old for the part by then. (Though he looks a little like 1980s Sting in that photo.) He did his only King Lear for television in 1983. He was judged a bit too old and weak for it by then, though with brilliant moments. I don't know about that, but it's still available and there's a lot to like and learn in his performance. John Geilgud played both parts several times on the stage--he did his first of four Lears while in his 20s. He was happy with only one of them.

Just the Play

Richard Burton in the 1964 "Hamlet"
on Broadway, directed by John Gielgud.

Rediscovering the Gielgud-Burton "Hamlet"

On my most recent visit to Booklegger in Eureka, I found a copy of the first and probably only edition of Richard Burton in Hamlet, a book by actor Richard L. Sterne. In 1964, John Gielgud directed Burton on Broadway, at the height of his Burton-and-Elizabeth Taylor fame --the two actually got married while the play was in rehearsal. Sterne was a young actor in the production, and apparently all on his own, he decided to secretly tape record the rehearsals.

He hid a bulky reel-to-reel of the time in a briefcase, with the microphone pointed through a hole in the side of it. And once when he wanted to record a rehearsal with just Burton and Gielgud, he hid himself as well, under the stage. He stayed there not only for the two hours of rehearsal, but for several hours more until stagehands left, so he wouldn't be discovered.

Then after it was all over he told Gielgud and Burton about it, and they thought it was hilarious.

Sterne also took notes, and then had hours and hours of transcripts to make and edit. The book came out three years later, and probably didn't catch the wave of interest the play generated--it was a Broadway hit, sold out for its entire run. But the result is fascinating to read, more for Gielgud than Burton now, though there is some interesting dialogue with him. Gielgud was in touch one way or another (as participant, theatregoer or student of the lore) with every major production of Hamlet going back to the nineteenth century. Besides the history and how it informed his approach, this book offers some fascinating ideas and insights on directing for the theatre.

That production is also notable because it was one of the first that presented Shakespeare in modern dress--in this case in "rehearsal clothes," with no scenery and minimal set. There was a fashion for this minimal approach for awhile. It was supposed to strip the plays down to their essentials, undistracted by period clothes and elaborate scenery.

Gielgud wanted to do the play as if it were the final run-through before the technical rehearsals, before the costumes inhibit and change performances, and the sets "as beautiful as they are," he says in the first rehearsal, "they sort of cramp the imagination and the poetry--and they are apt to destroy the pace."

For the audience, this style provides the opportunity to concentrate on the acting, the words, and the play itself. Just the play.

Personally, I can't wait for this style to come back, and replace today's orthodoxy, which is to transplant Shakespeare to another time and place, regardless of how appropriate to the play, and the more outlandish the resulting set and costumes, the better. What might have helped directors, actors and audiences alike see the plays afresh has often become distraction and sensationalism, a way to sell the show with the Shakespeare brand while mocking the plays at the same time. The intent also seems to be to reassure the audience that there's really nothing there but cliches and pageantry, so there's no reason to aspire to a deeper understanding. Don't worry, it's just a show.

What excellent productions of any kind actually do--whether they are period, transplanted or minimalist like the Gielgud-Burton Hamlet--is reveal both the depths of the play, some of its complexity, and also the bedrock humanity and human situations that indeed are universal and can communicate to any audience. Done well, Shakespeare's plays are great shows. I suspect that the when this predominant style of presentation fades or is put out of our misery, something like the Gielgud-Burton Hamlet style will return.

But is switching time and place always bad? See the review below of the Kenneth Branagh As You Like It on DVD.

Quoth

George Bernard Shaw wrote his play, Saint
Joan, for Sybil Thorndike to play. She did
(as pictured above) to great acclaim. So on
the anniversary of the death of Joan of Arc,
this quotation from Sybil Thorndike (as recalled
by John Geilgud in his autobiography): "I hate
pathos. It's soft and weak. But tragedy
has fight."

April Fool's Day has a long history, associated with the "allowed fool" or jester tradition, and related to our own freedom of speech. (An account of this history is on my Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily blog today.)

The fool and the clown are also important in the history--and pre-history-- of theatre. These days we're most familiar with the figure of the fool in Shakespeare. The Fool is a character in the comedies of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, and the tragedies of King Lear and Hamlet. But the various aspects of the Fool, and the contrast with the King, or the law, is important in other plays in the Shakespeare canon as well.

In Shakespeare the Thinker, his new (and last) book, the late Shakespearian scholar A. D. Nuttall, writes of the many ways these themes weave through the cycle of histories which includes Henry IV, Part One. Richard II (the monarch of the play of that title which directly precedes the Henry IV plays) is a paradoxical character, sympathetic at times because he is philosophical and poetical, yet as a king he is ineffectual, indecisive (he sees too many ironies to act) and impulsive, given to arbitrary and quixotic decisons. (Nuttall says that the only actor equal to playing all this colors of Richard II was John Gielgud.)

But Bolingbroke who deposes him, is a practical man of action. His despair over the frivolities of his son, Prince Hal, are expressed at times in connection with Richard, who he compares to a Fool rather than a King. He is afraid Hal will be the same kind of monarch, ruled by folly.

The Fool character in the Henry IV plays is Falstaff, of course. (The photo is Ralph Richardson portraying Falstaff). In Shakespeare's time and place, as in our own, clowns were popular on the stage. Shakespeare used this appeal but gave it dramatic and thematic meaning. Falstaff is therefore a complex character. Like the Fool in the court jester tradition, he sees the folly of human vanities--in this case especially, of war. Like the trickster characters of many nations, including the Coyote and Raven in Native cultures, he is also a creature of guile and appetite, undone by his own vanities and vices. But like many fool characters, he represents the joys of life as well. His role in Prince Hal's life partakes of all these, and more.