ARTS Chekhov's early bird
HILARY SPURLING
It was an extraordinary sensation to watch the Moscow Art Theatre (the final coup in this year's World Theatre Season) at the Aldwych on Monday in The Seagull: the play which, at the end of the last century, made revolution in theatrical Moscow, established overnight Stanislaysky's now legendary company and confirmed Chekhov (who had been more than dubious—'having read through my newborn play, I again became convinced that I am not at all a dramatist') as a playwright. The seagull has been the company's emblem ever since.
It is a curious reversal that the play's fierce injunctions, against the dead hand of convention and in favour of new forms, now issue from the lips of an old master. This production—directed by B. N. Livanov ('Chekhov hated naturalism . . . I've tried to obey his instinct as a reformer of the bad old theatrical tradition')—is in fact by no means timid: it has replaced the old fourth-wall set with a gaunt, art nouveau construction lowered from the flies, so that actors may occasionally be glimpsed prick- ing through the wings to make an entrance, and punctuated the play with snatches of Scriabin. In other words, the MAT seems to be edging slowly towards the first stages of a movement which has been going on for a long time now in the West. The result is that this production is familiar in a way that the same company's The- Cherry Orchard (in Mr Daubeny's season six years ago) was not: that production, precisely because of its great age, sprang with a rich and strange magical solidity from a world with which we have long since lost direct contact. The occasional staginess of this one—Konstantin's ravaged face up- lifted (in a curious last-act flashback to his theatre by the lake) by moonlight to the sound of sleighbells; the wind machine which howls while open doors and windows remain obstinately unaffected by the storm — emphasised whatever in the play has dated, not least the 'Ibsenism . . . running through the whole play like a red thread' to which the Alexandrinsky Theatre's liter- ary committee objected in 1896.
Not that the company's acting has changed or grown less subtle: I. P. Miro- schnichenko's lovely, pale, set Masha is an exquisite creation; S. I. Korkoshko's Nina, plump and sweet and stiff like a china doll, makes something both forlorn and wild out of Konstantin's first play. It is rather that the finest things in this Seagull—the intricate, melancholy bustle of arrivals and
departures for which the MAT is famous, the gusts of passion spurting between the
chinks of apathy in the scene with Mme Stepanova's formidable Arkadina and Trigorin (a marvellously self-absorbed per- formance by L. I. Gubanov)—work in spite, and not because, of the painted flats which insist that we are in a theatre. For what emerges most clearly from this production is not so much a break with thc past, rather a wholly traditional sense or disgruntled, tetchy, more or less disagreeable people, pursuing hopeless objects, rubbing stonily against one another, turning this way and that to catch the light and shine with that peculiar radiance which comes of Chekhov's steadfast emotional honesty. To see this company at all, and most especially in the play which once made his name and theirs, makes a brilliant finish to Mr Daubeny's last, and perhaps his grandest season.
Meanwhile, the English theatre was in nostalgic mood last week with a pair of dressy dramas set in an unlikely past. But it is hard to imagine anyone who would not enjoy the suave flummery of Robert Bolt's Vivat! Vivat Regina! at Chichester: thrift is the chief virtue of a play which, covering two reigns as turbulent as those of Eliza- beth I and Mary Stuart, leaves out pretty well all affairs, whether parliamentary, reli- gious, military or financial, save affairs of the heart. It is characteristic of Mr Bolt's discretion that the mysteries he solves—the deaths of Amy Robsart and Rizzio, what exactly happened at Kirk o' Feld and on whose orders—are treated purely as part of an agitated home life. Elizabeth's sole advisers — almost her sole companions are Cecil and Dudley; Mary's court has shrunk to a couple of foreigners, got up in silver and blue to distinguish them from a horde of more or less comical Scotsmen dressed in puffed tweed hose.
But Viva!! Vivat Regina! is a play on easy terms with Shakespeare and Brecht as well as Richard of Bordeaux, borrowing purely technical devices from all three, imitating neither the complexity of the first two nor the sentimental excesses of the third. If it is peopled with the sleek, romantic figures of popular legend, then at no point are they permitted the kind of spurious emotion which stock characters will not bear; indeed, one of the play's many pleasures is its humorous and level tone. Even the potentially most dangerous scene—in which Walsingham interrogates Nicholas Fenton, bloody and faint from the rack—dryly conveys the heroism of the Catholic martyrs, the weighty reasons of the Protestant authorities and the sad fact that each side, from its own point of view, was indubitably right.
But the play's chief virtue is as a vehicle for its two queens, passing with averted eyes on Carl Toms's handsome staircase (a set built, like the play, for stately entrances and exists). What is odd about Eileen Atkins's Elizabeth is that, in so bland a setting, she brings something of the richness of a rude, crude age, its barbarity and grandeur, as well as a translucent beauty. It shines through her first scenes as a risky girl - delicate, aquiline features, pale skin and flamey hair—and the flamboyance of her middle years. She gives to the brief scene, in which Elizabeth lays out meagre sums to scotch Mary and build Drake a navy, an electric sense of power politics at work; her changing relationship with Cecil (fetch- ing performance by Richard Pearson) is most fastidiously drawn; and her final in- carnation catches uncannily both the sharpening features and the formal, hieratic majesty of Elizabeth's late portraits.
Sarah Miles's Mary is altogether gentler, preserving with great skill the impression which that queen has chiefly made on an admiring posterity: captivating in velvet and pearls, frail but fine as a prisoner in simple wool, greatly wronged and still more greatly brave as she goes in red taffeta to the block. Edward Atienza makes a splendid Scottish ambassador, Leonard Maguire's John Knox and Archie Duncan's Lord Morton are a pair of quaint and sprightly bodies, and the admirably fluent produc- tion is by Peter Dews.
Which brings us to Abelard and Heloise. at Wyndham's, adapted by Roanald Millar who once did the same for C. P. Snow. Mr Millar might have been wiser not to meddle with Abelard, 'the mind that set the century ablaze', here interpreted by Keith Michell as a kind of mediaeval Tarzan, forever shinning up ladders (monster climbing-frame set by Daphne Dare), glowing dumbly down from balcon- ies or holding forth, while dangling by one arm from a pillar, with rare fatuity to en- raptured theological students. Things are even worse when he comes to lecturing ('As a virgin of thirty-seven, I speak with authority . . .) on sexual topics. As for scenes of action—homosexual flagellation, the lovers' naked grapple, castration as a grand finale—these suggest a combination of bathos and extreme vulgarity difficult to credit.
Robin Phillips directed this production. in which singing monks in suede shoes line up along the set, looking uncomfortably squashed, clicking their fingers from time to time or falling suddenly on one knee, for all the world like the chorus from The Desert Song. To find Diana Rigg, an Heloise as lovely to look at as she is dis- piriting to listen to, in these straightened circumstances is wretched; only Timothy West as Gilles de Vannes keeps his head throughout this astonishing affair.
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