Addicted to Chekhov

One departs and three more come charging in. It’s always rush-hour for Chekhov in the capital. As the Young Vic’s production of Three Sisters is drawing to a close, the Vaudeville is preparing to host a star-studded version of Uncle Vanya. Up the road, at the Novello, another Uncle Vanya is about to arrive from Moscow. And rehearsals are already under way for The Seagull, starring Matthew Kelly, at Southwark Playhouse. For years, we’ve been recreational users of Chekhov. We’re now in danger of becoming hopeless addicts. How come we’re hooked?

Chekhov’s career as a dramatist was short and full of trouble. Early plays flopped. His breakthrough hit, The Seagull, also bombed when it was first performed in 1896 at the highly traditional Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Two years later, a revival at the more progressive Moscow Arts Theatre was a surprise success. Chekhov followed it up with Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Then he died.

His naturalistic style was something new in the theatre. Rather than creating rowdy, dashing heroes and elaborate cliffhanging plots, he set out to depict the slow, ticking banalities of everyday life in the Russian provinces. When the director Peter Brook first saw Chekhov, he said it was like listening to a tape recorder that had been accidentally switched on during a family argument. To modern audiences, raised on reality TV and soap operas, this humdrum realism is already in tune with our aesthetic expectations. So we approach these towering foreign masterpieces with an easy mind. They’re classics but they haven’t the scariness or the exalted pretensions of ‘classic’ classics. And because Chekhov wrote just four great plays we can complete the set over a long weekend. To do that with Ibsen would take a fortnight. With Shaw, three weeks.