Three Sisters E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 146

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Chekhov's masterpiece of provincial claustrophobia, translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine. Living in a provincial army barrack town, Olga, Masha and Irina are finding life dull and long for the vitality of Moscow. Meanwhile their brother's wife begins to take over their house and their lives. Anton Chekhov's play Three Sisters was first performed in 1901 at the Moscow Art Theatre. This translation by Stephen Mulrine, published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, was first staged by Bristol Old Vic and Out of Joint on tour in 1995.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THREE SISTERS

by

Anton Chekhov

translated and introduced by

Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Chekhov: Key Dates

Dramatis Personae

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog in South Russia, in 1860, just before the Emancipation, although his family had been bought out of serfdom some years earlier, by his paternal grandfather. By his own account, Chekhov’s childhood was far from idyllic. His father Pavel was a domestic tyrant, fanatically religious, and Chekhov and his brothers were forced to rise before dawn to sing in the local church choir, then work long hours after school, minding the family grocery business.

Chekhov’s record at the Taganrog school, not surprisingly, was undistinguished, and at the age of sixteen he was left behind to complete his education, when the family fled to Moscow to escape the consequences of his father’s bankruptcy. In 1879, Chekhov entered Moscow University’s Faculty of Medicine, and soon became the family’s principal breadwinner, writing short comic pieces to supplement his student allowance.

By the time Chekhov qualified in 1884, his literary ambitions were already in conflict with what he regarded as his vocation, and indeed until his own health collapsed, he continued to practise medicine, mostly as an unpaid service. Chekhov was almost certainly infected with tuberculosis from childhood, and the disease was in its terminal stages before he would consent to a diagnosis. In addition to frequent haemorrhaging from the lungs, compelling him to spend the winters in the warm South, Chekhov suffered from a variety of other debilitating ailments, which make his work-rate little short of heroic. In 1899, when he sold the rights in his works to the publisher Marks, they already filled ten volumes, and the critical consensus is that his short stories represent an unparalleled achievement in the form, with the three great plays of his mature dramatic method scarcely less important.

Human relationships are the substance of his work, and it is perhaps no surprise that this most intimate of writers remained elusive in his own relationships. Fond of women, and pursued by several, Chekhov characteristically retreated as they advanced, and it is arguable that the happiness of his brief married life, with the actress Olga Knipper, depended on the lengthy periods of separation forced on the couple by Chekhov’s poor health, and Olga’s busy metropolitan career.

Finally, in an effort to postpone the inevitable, Chekhov travelled with Olga to Germany for medical treatment, and in July 1904, following a heart attack, he died in the spa town of Badenweiler, at the age of forty-four.

Three Sisters: What Happens in the Play

To write a play exploring a situation in which ‘nothing happens’ is to risk being accused of writing a play in which nothing happens. This has been Chekhov’s fate with Three Sisters: critics used to condemn the play as formless, actionless, plotless – any kind of ‘less’ they could think of. In fact it is tightly controlled, as precise in its effects as poetry, as organised as chamber music. Rather than revealing the situation in a narrative way, Chekhov sets it out whole and then explores it detail by detail: it is as if we were experiencing a painting or a tapestry, and the play’s momentum depends as much on gradual discovery, inexorable revelation, as on plot-’surprises’ or consequentiality.

Olga, Masha and Irina Prozorov are three sisters, daughters of a recently dead general in a remote battalion town. They are upper-middle-class, and feel stifled by the dullness of their provincial environment. They dream of moving to the sophistication and intellectual and emotional fulfilment of Moscow. In the meantime, Olga parcels out her time as an overworked headmistress, Masha is trapped in a stifling marriage to the boring schoolmaster Kulygin, and Irina has a dead-end job in the Post Office. The sister’s weak-willed brother Andrei marries a local girl, Natalya, and part of the story involves the way her ferocious ambition and energy becomes more and more at odds with the sisters’ genteel, conventional and more kindly outlook on life.

If the situation revolves round the growing tension between Natalya and the sisters (and Andrei’s unhappiness and bafflement as he watches it), the action also involves attempts to break out, to fulfil themselves, by Masha and Irina. Masha begins a love-affair with Vershinin, a colonel in the garrison – but it comes to nothing when the regiment is moved on and he leaves her. Irina engages herself to a man she doesn’t love, Baron Tuzenbakh – but he is killed in a pointless duel. Other characters include two popinjay second lieutenants, Fedotik and Rode, the elderly army doctor Chebutykin, who escapes the dreariness of life by drinking, and the elderly nurse Anfisa, one of the principal targets of Natalya’s zeal for change.

In the counterpoint of images and ideas which ally the play’s structure to music, two themes are particularly prominent. Tuzenbakh and Vershinin have long conversations, what Chekhov calls ‘philosophising’, about how much better life may be 200 years from now, and the metaphor of bird-migration constantly reappears. We humans are like birds, busy about our lives, but underlying everything is the unexplained, unexplainable urge to to take flight, to migrate from this daily existence to another – and if this is not acknowledged, or is frustrated, our existence can become insupportable.

Chekhov the Dramatist

Chekhov might be described as par excellence the writer’s writer, not only on account of his work, or the fund of wisdom in his correspondence, ranging from points of principle to technical wrinkles, but also the example he presents of the restless self-improver, grinding his way over a mere two decades from penny-a-line squibs in the Russian equivalent of ‘Tit-Bits’, to the status of modern classic, in both his preferred genres.

In that respect, the year 1887-88 represents a turning-point in his career, with the production in November 1887 of his first four-act play, Ivanov, and the publication, in March the following year, of his short story ‘The Steppe’ in one of the prestige ‘thick journals’, “The Northern Herald”. The same year also witnessed his official recognition as a major Russian writer with the award of the Pushkin Prize by the Academy of Sciences. Chekhov had arrived, though the extraordinary reception given to the Moscow première of Ivanov, greeted with mixed cheering and booing, suggested that he had arrived as a dramatist some way ahead of his audience.

Indeed, that is broadly the story of Chekhov’s dramatic career, and it is significant that the main bone of contention in Ivanov, dividing first-nighters into partisans and scoffers, was the author’s seeming abdication of any clear moral stance with respect to the play’s ‘anti-hero’ Ivanov and its voice of conscience, the self-righteous Dr Lvov. After some changes, however, the play was successfully revived in St.Petersburg, and Chekhov was sufficiently encouraged by the experience to offer The Wood Demon for production in Moscow the following year. Alas, The Wood Demon was a flop, and in the light of Chekhov’s developing method, it is interesting to note that criticism generally centred on its lack of action and dreary, slice-of-life dialogue. Chekhov withdrew the play in disgust, and buried it deep within his mysterious creative processes, whence it re-surfaced in 1898, in the radically altered form of Uncle Vanya, one of the greatest works of the modern theatre.

In between times, in 1896, Chekhov had also endured the catastrophic failure of The Seagull, an experience which encapsulated almost everything that was wrong with the Russian theatre he inherited, and which his work did so much to change. The Seagull was premièred in October 1896 at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St.Petersburg, having spent almost a year in the hands of the censors, and the actors received their scripts a bare week before opening night. The play had been commissioned from Chekhov in the belief that it would be a fitting vehicle for the benefit performance of one of the Alexandrinsky’s stars, a mature comedienne with a large and vociferous following.

For most Russians, Chekhov’s reputation was still that of ‘Antosha Chekhonte’, the comic journalist of the previous decade, and while The Seagull is undoubtedly more robust than Stanislavsky’s later interpretation, it is very far from the broad comedy Madame Levkeyev’s fans were expecting. She had originally been billed to play Arkadina, and disappointment at her non-appearance soon gave way to whistling and jeering, from Nina’s Act One monologue as the ‘World Spirit’ onwards.

Not for the first or last time, Chekhov’s irony escaped the play’s more sober critics, who affected to believe that Konstantin’s absurd symbolist playlet represented the new form of theatre that his creator sought. The Seagull is a transitional work, nonetheless, and in that regard it is notable that the Alexandrinsky Theatre Committee, despite accepting the play for production, expressed reservations about its ‘Ibsenism’ – a comparison Chekhov would not have relished.

After the fiasco of The Seagull, Chekhov virtually fled from St. Petersburg, and although the play’s fortunes improved with ‘normal’ audiences, for the remainder of its brief run, the generally hostile reviews made him resolve to quit the theatre for ever. Fortunately, the first great play of his mature dramatic method, Uncle Vanya, appears to have been nearing completion by this time, and while the course of its development out of The Wood Demon remains shrouded in mystery, it is difficult to believe that it could have preceded The Seagull. At any rate, Uncle Vanya first surfaced in 1897, when Chekhov included it in a published collection of his plays.

The following year, 1898, saw the coming together of Chekhov and the directors of the newly-founded Moscow Art Theatre – a union commonly presented as a marriage made in theatre heaven. Both parties shared an intense dissatisfaction with the Russian theatre of the day, its bombastic acting, poor technical standards, and outmoded star system. What Chekhov’s plays needed – natural, unforced speaking, even-handed ensemble playing and meticulous rehearsal, led by sensitive interpretation – appeared to be exactly what Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko could bring to them. And if the marriage turned out to be less than wholly blissful, it is to their credit, nonetheless, that Chekhov continued to write for the theatre, including the two masterpieces specially commissioned by the Moscow Art Theatre, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

Chekhov had in fact written to Nemirovich-Danchenko in November 1896, soon after the Alexandrinsky première of The Seagull, and his own words best describe the trauma he had experienced: “The theatre breathed malice, the very air was compressed with hatred, and in accordance with the laws of physics, I shot out of St. Petersburg like a bomb!” Not surprisingly, Chekhov’s health took a severe downturn at this point, and by the time Nemirovich-Danchenko had managed to convince both Chekhov and his co-director Stanislavsky that the new company, already ailing, should stage The Seagull, the pattern of Chekhov’s relationships with the Moscow Art Theatre was effectively set – fleeting visits for readthroughs and rehearsals, fine tuning by correspondence, and the tense wait by the phone for news of the opening. Indeed, not until 1900, when the Moscow Art Theatre visited Yalta, did Chekhov see the company perform his work.

The rapturous reception accorded to The Seagull, at its Moscow première on the 17th of December 1898, has of course passed into theatre legend, as have Chekhov’s disagreements, with Stanislavsky in particular, over the interpretation of his work. In general terms, Stanislavsky tended to over-direct the plays, often imposing a sentimental colouring on Chekhov’s characters, and detailing their physical environment too precisely through his notorious noises-off. What the Moscow Art Theatre did give Chekhov, however, was adequate rehearsal – twelve weeks for The Seagull, for example – and indeed the company’s legacy can be seen in the extravagant run-up times, and autocratic direction, of much Russian theatre still.

The success of The Seagull not only restored Chekhov’s confidence, it also rescued the Moscow Art Theatre, and the company were eager to attempt Uncle Vanya, which had already been staged in the provinces, following its publication the previous year. Unfortunately, Chekhov had promised the play to the prestigious Maly Theatre, but the script changes being demanded by its literary committee gave him a legitimate excuse for withdrawing the offer, and Uncle Vanya was duly produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in October 1899 – in terms of its reception, more consolidation than triumph, perhaps, but sufficiently encouraging to focus Chekhov’s mind on the subject he had already identified for a wholly new work – the lives of three sisters, daughters of the garrison, in a remote provincial town.

Chekhov arrived in Moscow with the completed manuscript of Three Sisters the following October, but his first readthrough with the actors, including Olga Knipper (whom he was soon to marry, and for whom he had designed the role of Masha) ran into predictable difficulties over his intention, and crucial questions of tone. During the winter months, which Chekhov’s deteriorating health compelled him to spend in Nice, he continued to revise Three Sisters, and attempted, at long range, to restrain Stanislavsky’s exuberance – though to do him justice, the director swiftly dropped his original plan to have Tuzenbakh’s corpse ferried across the stage after the Act Four duel!

Chekhov was still out of the country when Three Sisters opened, in January 1901, and while it was certainly no failure, neither it, nor The Cherry Orchard three years later, managed to repeat the smash hit of The Seagull. Chekhov was bitterly disappointed, but in each case, the longer the plays ran, the better the audience response, and a revival of Three Sisters in Moscow the following season successfully established it in the repertoire.

By the spring of 1903, when he at last committed The Cherry Orchard to paper, Chekhov had little more than a year left to live, and required some persistent coaxing by Olga Knipper and Stanislavsky to have the play ready for the next season. When the Moscow Art Theatre did finally receive the script in October, Stanislavsky’s effusive account of how he had dissolved in tears, reading what Chekhov insisted was a comedy, can scarcely have extended the author’s life.

Chekhov’s theatre, of course, had outstripped the terminology available to him, and despite its genuine achievement, Stanislavsky’s still bore traces of the overblown, melodramatic tradition it had been created to supplant. Chekhov’s instructions to Stanislavsky, throughout the period of their association, amount to a plea for understatement, for a lightness of touch foreign to the actor-director’s instincts. Indeed, it may be suspected that the growing audience for the Moscow Art Theatre’s Chekhov, then and later, more readily understood and empathised with the tragic somnambulists of Stanislavsky’s interpretation, than the robust complexity of Chekhov’s own vision.

Certainly, that was Mayakovsky’s judgment, less than a generation after Chekhov’s death, when he poured scorn on this bloodless theatre, with its ‘Auntie Manyas and Uncle Vanyas lolling on the settee’, but that was no fault of Chekhov’s, who was scarcely more enchanted by his gallery of fainéants than was Mayakovsky. That is quite a different matter from the enchantment of the plays themselves, which remains a constant through changing interpretations – and that same oblique, low-key rhetoric, which challenged his original audiences, allows us to hear Chekhov still as among the most modern voices of the classic drama repertoire.

Three Sisters

Chekhov describes Three Sisters as a ‘drama’, the only play he so designates, and in a letter written soon after its completion, he speaks of it having ‘an atmosphere more gloomy than gloom itself’. Its central theme, that of the creeping usurpation of the Prozorovs’ house and patrimony by Natasha, is prefigured in a short story of 1899, ‘In the Ravine’, in which the lively and industrious Aksinya eventually drives her husband’s family out of their own house, having earlier killed her sister-in-law’s baby in an act of casual savagery. Aksinya also has a long-running affair with a local mill-owner, and there are enough other similiarities between this grimly un-Tolstoyan peasant idyll and Three Sisters to suggest that Chekhov was revisiting the subject for his first Moscow Art Theatre commission.

Three Sisters is, however, a masterpiece of free-standing construction, and even the most cursory inspection of its intricate mechanisms, the complex interconnected lives of its ten major players, gives the lie to the persistent notion that Chekhov’s drama lacks plot. In abstract terms, there is an element of folk-tale symmetry about the play, and it is perhaps not too fanciful to extend this to a crude typology of the sisters themselves – the solidly domestic Olga, the sensual Masha, the virginal Irina – like facets of some idealised Woman. These, and the relentless forward movement of the play, as Natasha colonises room after room in the Prozorov house, furnish the scaffolding of Three Sisters, but Chekhov’s is an art of concealment, such that we are aware only of the detail, the civilised table-talk for the most part, of a community in which on-stage violence is represented by Natasha’s rudeness to the servants, while Masha and Vershinin conduct their extramarital indiscretions for the most part in discreet code.

Chekhov’s declared intention was to banish ‘drama’ to the wings, and Three Sisters achieves this in more than the off-stage pistol shot which wrecks Irina’s hopes. Protopopov, for example, a prime mover in the sisters’ downhill slide, appears only by passing mention – the absent cake-giver at Irina’s name-day party, Natasha’s gentleman caller, in his waiting troika, little Sophie’s babysitter, and putative father, when the usurpation is finally complete. Protopopov’s cake, in the context of later developments, has a distinctly bitter aftertaste.