At the one scale end we have the ancient drama focused around particular concerns, time-spacial confines, poetry and lyricism. Then from the 18th century (with those comedies of manners) and approaching the 20th, the new school does away with all that, yielding to pure verbal battlement, to the merciless human interplay borderline galimatias.
Some playwrights emphasize a social commentary. With Chekhov, I don’t detect much of that. More striking is a polyphony of pure, charged kinetic interchange. Theatre actors must love it.
One mechanic Chekhov still inherits from the older tradition is the soliloquy. Select cast occasionally diverts attention directly to the audience for a lengthy soul-searching reflection. But that aside and the dynamic easily approximates almost natural human dialogue save for certain elevated, exalted eloquence.
Universal to all these plays, we encounter immutable thematics: unrequited passion, boredom (or the perils in the lack of industriousness), regret, complaints, misfortune. The old age fever seems to contaminate the cast as young as their thirties.
Always set in some province if not an entirely desolate ditch, they yearn for the city. But those of the city discover a grass of no greener texture, returning to the livestock as miserable.
A doctor invariably joins the supporting cast. While Chekhov doesn’t ridicule and reduce this profession to a satire like Moliere (Chekhov was himself a doctor of sorts), Chekhov’s doctors are likewise not devoid of the buffooneries of drunkenness, hypocrisy or charlatanism.
It goes to say, the social ranks among the cast don’t factor into their psychological makeup, inhibitions and inclinations in the most indicative of manners.
In its psychology, the kind of mood I derive across these plays most closely resembles the characters of Tarkovsky cinema, seconded by Bergman and perhaps something of C. T. Dreyer. Select Woody Allen pictures shaped from some of the above inspirations also take roots in Chekhov’s ambiance.
Many of the lengthier dialogues likewise remind me of these classic, hybrid enlightenment novels as Don Quixote or Voltaire’s Candide that are many things at once including impressive theatrical compositions.
Though of radically varying scope and kinesis the two, I’ve often found myself ambivalent to the wider objective and engaged entirely in essay-length dialectic, in the sorts of suspension chambers within these epic frameworks.
So if you appreciate the above nuances, it makes all the more sense to read Chekhov’s plays, or any similar theatre, including Ibsen’s and Shaw’s; maybe even the Absurd which I’ve never found the taste for.
As for the play particulars, I consider all tragi-comedies. Вишневый Сад I’d already addressed.
Чайка/Seagull is a satirical reflection on writing and theatre. Дядя Ваня/Uncle Vanya (subtitled «Сцены из деревенской жизни в четырёх действиях») must be the soppiest and least tragic of the lot. Три сестры/Three sisters places officers and civilians in close quarters of particularly tense family dynamic. In this play the external environment also most heavily contributes.
But all otherwise cater to the same underlying themes and inexhaustible philosophizing. I can see a bit more clearly now how Chekhov influenced much of the subsequent 20th century theatrical and cinematic development.
Questions, comments? Connect.