The Modern Era II: Shaw, Wilde & Chekhov

Late in his life, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) made the mournful but witty observation, “I have solved practically 

all the pressing problems of our time, but...they keep on being propounded as if I’d never existed!”  Shaw’s attempts to save the world took the form of manifestos, pamphlets, books, and of course, plays.  He created a theatre of ideas, a “useful” theatre. He blasted Shakespeare for weaving a beautiful veil of illusion over the truth. Far more important is the writer who teaches a doctrine via the drama of thought.  Listen to this Shavian comparison:

“A Doll’s House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.”

It should come as no surprise, having read this quote, that Shaw wrote a booklet in praise of one of his idols, called “The Quintessence of Ibsenism.”  Like Ibsen, Shaw wrote plays that did “work in this world,” but he had an artistic genius for humor, which is probably more why he’s revived today than for his utilitarian ideas.  One of Shaw’s earliest “great” plays was Arms and the Man (1894), in which he exploded romantic conceptions of love and war.  Sergius, who leads a stupid charge into the enemy and accidentally wins the battle 

is viewed by the author and by the lead character Bluntschli as a buffoon, not a hero.  A few years later, in The Devil’s Disciple (1897), Shaw played with the popular melodramatic form: a revolutionary war preacher is going to be killed by the British, but Dick Dudgeon, a ne’er-do-well, takes his place.  The preacher’s wife becomes enamored of Dudgeon, who seems to have the courage of her husband’s wordy convictions, But Shaw makes the seemingly verbose preacher the real hero (or is it General Burgoyne, the juiciest role in the play?) by turning the usual melodramatic plot on its ear and by giving great depth and insight to characters who in lesser writers’ hands would have been card-board, stereotyped cut-outs.

      

In 1903 Shaw wrote Man and Superman, which pitted the charming intellectual male, Jack Tanner, against the beautiful, earth-mother embodiment of the “life-force,” Anne Whitefield. Guess who wins?  Anne, of course, who at play’s end has the jabbering Jack exactly where she wants him. As 

he keeps propounding his theories, her response (and last line of the play) is, “Just go on talking, Jack.” Then in 1913, Pygmalion pitted Professor Henry Higgins against Eliza Doolittle. They end, having learned from each other, as friends, and perhaps both better off for it, in the original play at least. My Fair Lady has turned Shaw’s treatise on the classes into a love story...”I’ve grown accustomed to her face…”

   

Heartbreak House (1914-1919) is perhaps Shaw’s most serious comic play to its date.  The house is a metaphor for 

England, on the brink of calamity and collapse, drifting into a destructive and futile war.  And Saint Joan (1923) is difficult to call comic, though it has brilliant comic moments.  Joan of Arc rescues France and for her troubles is burned at the stake, by a coalition of politically astute and cynical secular and religious French and Englishmen.  Joan’s last lines, “Earth, when will you be ready to receive your saints? How long, oh, Lord, how long?” could easily have been spoken by Shaw himself -- when would the world be ready to grasp his simple solutions?  As we see in the early years of the twenty-first century, apparently it has not as yet...

      

In sharp contrast to Shaw and writing at the same time was a playwright who rejected “useful” theatre and who celebrated

“art for art’s sake.”  Oscar Wilde (1853-1900) celebrated this idea throughout and in his own life, and certainly in his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).  The title plays on the importance of being earnest, meaning sincere, unfeigned; and on the vital importance, for John (nicknamed Jack) Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, each to 

be named Ernest! Why?  Because the women they love desire it!  Early in the play, Jack Worthing -- who is Jack in the country, but Ernest in the city, is in the city proposing marriage to Gwendolyn, when he finds out that she loathes his real name:

Jack:  Personally darling, to speak quite candidly, I don’t much care about the name of Ernest...I don’t think the name suits me at all.

Gwendolyn:  It suits you perfectly.  It is a divine name.  It has a music of its own.  It produces vibrations.

Jack: “Well, really, Gwendolyn, I must say that I think there are lots of other much nicer names.  I think Jack, for instance, is a charming name.

Gwendolyn:  Jack?...No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed.  It does not thrill.  It produces absolutely no vibrations...I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain.  Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John!  And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John.  She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude.  The only really safe name…

is Ernest.

Jack:  Gwendolyn, I must get christened at once -- I mean we must get married at once!

Of course in real life, Wilde suffered mightily for his homosexuality.  Cast into Reading Gaol after a demeaning series of lawsuits and afterwards never quite the same, Oscar Wilde died well before his time.

      

Before we examine our fourth major dramatist of the modern era, and to help set that writer up, Dr Jack offers a short and dirty history of Russian drama up to the late nineteenth century. (You’re welcome.) We can trace theatre in Russia back to the seventeenth century, when traveling story-tellers/actors called skomorokhi wandered around enacting usually low comedies.  In the eighteenth century Peter the Great and after him Catherine the Great invited German

acting troupes in to entertain them, had theatres built and subsidized them, thus setting up a system of imperial or court theatres (in 1771 Catherine had the Bolshoi built in St Petersburg, and in 1779 established a training institute there). At the same time wealthy landowners built theatres on their estates and their serfs performed for them and their guests.  Some of these serfs became quite famous, and Prince Sheremetyevo, who built one of the finest serf theatres on his land outside Moscow, married one of his serf/actresses.

      

The first Russian plays that are still performed regularly were written in the early 1800s.  Alexander Griboyedev (1795-1829) wrote in a somewhat neoclassical style, and his most famous play Woe from Wit (also translated as Wit Works Woe 1822-25)), like Moliere’s The Misanthrope, shows up Russian society as materialistic and hypocritical.  Alexander 

Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia’s best-loved poet, represents the Russian Romantic style in his poetry and in his theatre. His most important play is the historical drama Boris Gudonov (1825), which is more often performed in its operatic form.  In the 1830s a more realistic style began to appear, roughly at the same time that Scribe was developing well-made plays in Paris.  Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) is perhaps the most important realist writer (though Gogol 

moves beyond realism into wild surrealism at times, and was best produced non-realistically in the 20th century).  His play The Inspector General (1836) depicts corrupt and petty people in a provincial Russian town as they fawn over a man they think is the government inspector. He’s not, but herealizes their error and cleverly makes idiots of them all in sometimes hilarious scenes. He makes his escape just before the REAL inspector general’s arrival is announced, to the consternation of the hypocritical community.

       

In the 1850s a very important realistic writer emerged. Ivan 

Turgenev (1818-1883) is probably best known for his novels that include Fathers and Sons, but his greatest play looks strongly forward to Chekhov. A Month in the Country (1850) is about the people who live on a country estate.  Turgenev uses domestic details to display the inner turmoil of these bored souls when a young tutor arrives and upsets the tedious status quo.

      

If Turgenev predated Chekhov in his use of psychological realism, Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886), Russia’s first full 

time professional playwright, made use of symbols in his realistic works, especially in The Storm (1859), and probably influenced Chekhov in his penchant for symbolism.  More usually Ostrovsky wrote comic dramas based on middle class merchants and society, for example, Diary of a Scoundrel (1868), probably his best known play outside Russia. These plays remain popular and are regularly produced in Russian theatres today.  Leo Tolstoy, the most famous Russian novelist (War and Peace, Anna Karenina) also wrote plays, and in the naturalistic vein.  His Power of Darkness (written 1866, first performed 1895) was produced at several independent theatres around Europe. 

   

By the mid-nineteenth century the Maly Theatre (opened 1824) in Moscow became known for its famous actors, while 

the Bolshoi (1825) offered ballet and opera.  Also after 1832 the Alexandrinsky offered “straight” plays; the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg produced opera and ballet. Its school trained some of the greatest dancers in the world.  In fact by the 1860s Russia had established state 

academies for training in acting, opera and ballet, not usual in western European countries.  In the latter half of the nineteenth century Russia began producing important classic ballets, reaching its peak under choreographer Marius Petipa, who in the 1890s choreographed most of Tchaikovsky’s major work -- Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, for example.

          

Which brings us to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1894), a practicing doctor who wrote many short stories and short plays, even a few full-length pieces, before he penned the four plays which secure his position as one of the four great modern dramatists:  The Seagull, Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904). 

Let’s look at Uncle Vanya as representative.  This is a typical old fashioned comic set up:  an aged curmudgeon, 

Serebryakov, has married a beautiful young woman, Elena. But Chekhov makes seemingly simple comic issues much more complex and life-like.  It seems that Serebryakov has been married before -- to Vanya’s sister.  She died, but not before giving birth to Sonya.  Sonya and her Uncle Vanya have been working on the family estate which was to have 

been shared by Vanya and his sister. But when she married, Vanya gave over his half of the estate to her.  When she died it all legally went to her husband, and Vanya has become a sort of overseer on an estate that he should have owned.  The already complicated plot thickens because almost immediately we see that Vanya is madly in love with the old fart’s wife.  To further complicate things, 

she’s not interested in Vanya. She’s much more attracted to his friend Dr Astrov.  In fact one of the great tragi-comic moments in the play comes when Astrov and Elena finally admit their feelings and kiss, just as Vanya comes through the door with a bunch of fresh-picked roses, “sad, autumn roses” for Elena. Is the plot not thick enough for you?  Well, Sonya also happens to be hopelessly in love with Astrov, who likes her as a friend, but no more than that.

      

Into all this madness comes Serebryakov with an idea. He’s going to SELL the estate. At this announcement, moments after seeing the love of his life kissing his best friend, Vanya 

flips out. He screams out inanities “I could have been a Schopenhauer!” and runs out of the room. Serebryakov is encouraged to follow him, and a few moments later a shot is heard. Re-enter, running, Serebryakov, followed by Vanya who shoots again...and misses! What could have become a tragedy ends in a pathetic bungled attempt, and the play ends with nothing really changing. The old man and his young wife go away, leaving Vanya and Sonya to do everything exactly as they had in the past, except of course that they won’t see Astrov very often any more. It’s a play about unfairness, confusion, broken hearts -- what Chekhov would call the human comedy.

      

The Cherry Orchard functions in a similar way.  This time Chekhov takes a familiar melodramatic form -- the mortgage melodrama. “The rent is overdue...oh what SHALL I do?”  

But of course he layers on psychologically complex characters and class struggles.  The Ranevsky estate is being sold. The person who buys it, Lopakhin, is the son of a former serf who worked on the estate.  Part of the estate is the cherry orchard that Lopakhin intends to cut down to make room for profitable summer cottages. Symbols abound. The old order is being “chopped down” to make way for the new.  Characters wander around lost, just passing the person who could possibly love them, save them.

      

One clever scholar (Brustein again) suggested that in this play Chekhov was writing 50 years ahead of his time.  He said that it is not at all a long jump from its last moments, as the cherry orchard is being chopped down, the sounds of axes heard cutting down the trees, to the first moment of a play whose landscape consists of only one tree, standing almost leafless in a barren landscape -- Waiting for Godot (aaah!)

     

Chekhov wrote plays in a new style, no thrilling climaxes, no poetic justice in the end, just the clumsiness, sometimes the 

beauty, sometimes the comic, sometimes the tragic in life.  He said:  “There is not a single villain or angel in my plays, though I did not resist the temptation of putting in a few buffoons.”  Brustein sums up his words on Chekhov by saying:  “Chekhov is the most humane of playwrights.  He manages through his 

characters to raise our expectations of the human race, evoking a singular affirmation even in the darkest despair.”  And Chekhov said, “My holy of holies are the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom.”  He himself was not all that healthy, and died at 43 of tuberculosis, shortly after the opening of The Cherry Orchard.  His last words?  “More champagne!”