The Seagull

An Insiders' Account of the Groundbreaking Moscow Production

Anatoly Efros, James Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351241991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

This book is an insiders' account of the groundbreaking Moscow production of Chekhov's The Seagull directed by Anatoly Efros in 1966, which heralded a paradigm shift in the interpretation and staging of Chekhov's plays. It is a unique glimpse behind the curtain of the laboratory of new Russian theatre in the twentieth century. Efros' articles about Chekhov and The Seagull, his diaries, interviews and conversations, and most importantly the original rehearsal records combine to form an in-depth account of of the director and his working process. This is an essential book for anyone with an interest in Chekhov and the history of modern Russian theatre.

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Chapter 1

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull on the Russian stage

Introduction: “Slaughtering Sacred Seagulls: Anatoly Efros’s Production of The Seagull at the Lenkom in 1966”

[The following extract is taken from Ros Dixon, “Slaughtering Sacred Seagulls: Anatoly Efros’s Production of The Seagull at the Lenkom in 1966,” Irish Slavonic Studies 21 (2000), 49–73.]

Anatoly Efros directed The Seagull in 1966 at the Lenkom Theatre, where he had been Artistic Director since 1964. His interpretation of Chekhov’s drama was entirely new to the Russian stage, and generated a critical uproar in the theatre world of Moscow. The production was said to have failed to express the mood of optimism demanded in Soviet interpretations of Chekhov. It also deliberately challenged the expectations of critics and audiences familiar with the approach and style of presentation used by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). This [Introduction] discusses Efros’s innovative approach in the context of the play’s performance history in Russia, with particular reference to Stanislavsky’s production of 1898, but shows too in what ways Efros’s Seagull reflected the political situation of its time and clarifies its role in his evolution as a director.

The true beginning of MAT was a marathon, eighteen-hour meeting between its founders, Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, which began at the Slaviansky Bazaar on 22 June 1897. But in both theatre mythology and authoritative histories, the origin of the new art of MAT is often seen to have been Stanislavsky’s production of The Seagull. That production is said to have been remarkable for its stunning sharpness, unrelenting fidelity to life and innovative staging.¹ But the real success of the play in 1898, as Edward Braun has maintained, was for the theatre itself: it gave the new company a sense of identity, a corporate style which, though still tentative, held infinite promise.² Indeed, the theatre affirmed that identity by adopting as its emblem the seagull which to this day is emblazoned across its front curtain.

The Seagull at MAT in 1898 was the second production of the play, the first having been staged two years previously at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Theatre histories and biographies of Chekhov have frequently dismissed this first production as an unmitigated disaster, and at the same time have lauded Stanislavsky’s interpretation as a complete success. But, as Laurence Senelick has acknowledged, this excessively simple assessment owes much to theatre legend, and like most legends is an accretion of half-truths and exaggerations around a kernel of truth.³ It is important to note, however, that Stanislavsky’s production was a significant turning point for Chekhov, who had been acclaimed as a writer of short stories and theatrical farces, but had enjoyed mixed success as a serious dramatist. He subsequently became closely associated with the theatre, working as the equivalent of an in-house playwright. As a result, the approach evolved by Stanislavsky became the definitive performance style for Chekhov’s work.

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The Seagull was also a triumph for Stanislavsky in the evolution of a new theatrical aesthetic and can be said to have laid the foundation of the future development of MAT.⁴ The theatre, first in its production of Tsar Fyodor and then with The Seagull, explored the concept – new at the time – of designing a production from scratch.⁵ In The Seagull Stanislavsky’s aim was to create a setting which would present as great an illusion of reality as possible. At that time, his company was housed in the Hermitage Theatre, and he used all that theatre’s resources in an attempt to create a complete world for the play. Every detail was incorporated into a complex visual and aural mise-en-scene, which was also intended to evoke atmosphere and to hint at a sub-text. The indoor scenes were crowded with authentic stage properties and loaded with realistic detail: thus, for instance, a real fire burned in the grate, and a glass held by Treplev shattered when he dropped it. In Chekhov’s stage directions, the opening act is set outdoors on the estate. He specifies that there is a lake and an avenue of trees, obscured from view by a stage hastily constructed for the presentation of Treplev’s play. Contrary to this instruction, the lake in Stanislavsky’s production dominated the stage area, and the designer, Viktor Simov, attempted to recreate the beauties of a moonlit country estate by using a half-lit tracery of foliage.

The technical resources of the Hermitage limited the realization of some of Stanislavsky’s plans, and his idea of creating a total illusion of reality appears to have been better as a concept than in its execution.⁶ In fact, at one point Simov resorted to using dimmed lighting in order to draw the audience’s attention away from the obvious artificiality of the set and from its crudely painted scenery.⁷ Nevertheless, for spectators accustomed to stock sets and painted drops this setting created a stunning effect. As Braun has remarked, one of the great merits for a contemporary audience of Stanislavsky’s production lay in the fact that everyday life was portrayed with a degree of fidelity that was entirely unprecedented.⁸ Stanislavsky also augmented Chekhov’s directions by adding an orchestrated score of sound effects throughout the action. The purpose of this was twofold: on the one hand, it generated a sense of a world beyond the set, on the other, it was used to create an appropriate mood for each scene. Mood was created through sound, and through silence. Stanislavsky’s production extended the pauses and silences, timing them exactly to between five and fifteen seconds. The entire pace of the play was slowed, and for the most part it was played as a mournful and lyrical elegy in which theatrical time was replaced, as it were, by real time.

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Stanislavsky’s production was greeted with ovations on its opening night, but it subsequently enjoyed only moderate success, playing just thirty-two times in four seasons. It was revived in 1905, but after only eleven performances was dropped from the repertoire completely.⁹

Having once found what he believed to be an appropriate style and mood for the works of Chekhov, Stanislavsky tended to repeat salient aspects of his first success in other productions. In fact, he developed something of a sub-genre in the Russian theatre of the time, a form which came to be known as the “Theatre of Mood.”¹⁰ In this manner, the very features of The Seagull which had recently seemed so innovative became instead the norm, and were judged to be an inherent part of the style of MAT.

That style, however, was inevitably affected by political developments. From the mid-1930s onwards, under the dictates of Socialist Realism, experimentation with literary and theatrical forms was discouraged, and departures from realism using symbols or other consciously theatrical techniques were condemned as decadent formalism. Instead, it became necessary for all theatre art to conform to a particular model, and, in keeping with this idea, the supposed realism of MAT was recast as the primary example of the Socialist Realist ideal. MAT’s presentational style was then actively promoted as a model to be copied in theatres throughout the Soviet Union.¹¹

The theatre was encouraged to produce, often in the manner of a factory production line, monumental and ideological epics extolling revolutionary and military victories, and these dramas began to overshadow its previous works. By this time, Stanislavsky had effectively retreated from the theatre he had founded, and those of his productions which continued to run became increasingly fossilized museum pieces.¹² Others, like The Seagull, although no longer part of the repertoire, became theatre legends and entered a kind of collective memory.

Furthermore, Stanislavsky’s productions of Chekhov in particular came to be synonymous with what were seen as “correct” interpretations and were frequently used as the ‘blueprint’ for subsequent productions. In terms of Chekhov’s scripts, this meant a failure to recognize the complexity of his writing, and therefore the possibility – indeed necessity – of multiple interpretations. Ironically, such rigidity of thought regarding Stanislavsky’s interpretations was directly contrary to his own credo and to the very essence of a theatre that had been founded on innovation and experimentation.¹³

During the Second World War, innovation in the Soviet theatre gave way to the imperatives of propaganda. In addition, many theatres were evacuated and new productions were few. The only Moscow production of The Seagull at this period was staged in 1944 by Aleksander Tairov in his bomb-damaged Kamerny Theatre. Tairov’s set was minimalist and consisted of a platform surrounded by grey and black velvet curtains. Different locales were established using a few stage properties and with delicate drapes, which were arranged differently for each scene and through which spotlights filtered, lending an airy and dreamlike quality. The director’s primary purpose was to reveal what he saw as a central theme of Chekhov’s play: the need for new art forms to attain the highest truth. He reduced the drama to a discourse on the nature of art, and to this end cut the script by a third. He eliminated lines and stage directions that referred to characters which he considered secondary, and removed details intended to produce a fuller picture of everyday life. Music was an important feature of all Tairov’s work, and in this case, he used the music of Tchaikovsky as an accompaniment to Treplev’s play. However, the production was essentially a concert performance and not a critical success. It soon closed, and indeed the theatre itself, condemned as an example of bourgeois decadence, was forced to do the same some six years later. However, the importance of Tairov’s Seagull should not be underestimated. Until Efros’s production 22 years later, this flawed version represented the only significant attempt to find a completely new interpretative key to Chekhov’s play.

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Other productions tended to preserve the legend of MAT, an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Seagull
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: How the New Chekhov Began
• 1 Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull on the Russian stage
• 2 Efros’s Preliminary Thoughts on The Seagull
• 3 Rehearsal Records of Anatoly Efros’s Production of The Seagull at the Lenkom Theatre, 1965–1966
• Epilogue
• Images
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index