A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  Inside the ballroom he halts, well in view of the audience through the aperture, and orders the band to play. The pause before it obeys is agonizing. When the music starts, Ranevskaya, who until now has held a monumental ‘freeze’ while seated on the chair she reached out for on hearing the news, and is alone on the main stage, begins to weep. Lopakhin breaks something in the ballroom with a violence in tune with the sacking of the Czar’s palace and comes into full view again, a tall man holding high on to both sides of the second aperture. We see him there, a few yards behind Ranevskaya, wild-eyed and panting, bestially dominant though limp from the emotional effort, until the woman’s misery seems to restore his humanity as a sense of guilt. He staggers miserably into the room and to the opposite side of the table against which she is sitting, like a child seeking reassurance after doing something outrageous. She does not even look at him.

  This episode illustrates, among other things, Chekhov’s organic use of the stage, including spatial build-up of dynamic movement and use of props every bit as important as the dialogue, and confirms that if Stanislavsky had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. […] Moreover the preliminary ballroom incidents modify one’s response to the climax and deepen its effect, not only by the obvious allusion to fiddling while Rome burns, but by lulling the audience into identification with the family, into their vulnerability. In order to do this, such things as Charlotta’s party tricks must be dazzlingly professional and make their own separate effect. We now know why Chekhov made Charlotta a fairground performer in childhood, why he insisted on strong casting for the part. He wanted to draw us into the family circle by direct traditional means.

  This seems unwarrantably remote from Lopakhin’s big scene, but art on The Cherry Orchard level casts wide for its coherence. Lukyanov’s acting of the scene has affinities with Stanislavsky’s poor relation, the Method, a shaggy quality also present in Trofimov and the Beggar.

  *

  Perhaps because of its ambiguous nature, and its integration of tragedy, sentiment, comedy and farce, The Cherry Orchard has become the most updated of Chekhov’s plays on the stage. (In film, of course, there is Vanya on 42nd Street) In some cases these productions have simply been intended to correct Stanislavsky’s overemphasis, and focussed on the comic aspect of the play. A case in point is the Tyrone Guthrie production of 1933, with Charles Laughton giving a typically farcical rendition of Lopakhin as “a loutish fellow, with head held on one side and flapping hands” – as one reviewer remarked:

  On its first production in London The Cherry Orchard seemed a lugubrious affair. The comic element was submerged. Mr. Tyrone Guthrie has not repeated the mistakes of Mr. Fagan, but in his determination to bring out the farcical extravagance of the dialogue and to dispel the notorious Russian gloom he has swung perilously near the other extreme …

  (The Times, 10 October 1933)

  However, Michel Saint-Denis’ dry, deliberately unpoetical and farcical production in 1961 was specifically intended to mirror the post-Holocaust, “absurdist” world, aligning The Cherry Orchard with Samuel Beckett. It was a challenge to the conventional views of Chekhov:

  The ‘connoisseurs’ have fallen in love with the scenery, with the dear creatures, representing the threatened past; they mock Trofimov and have little sympathy for Lopakhin; they were bound to resent the degradation of romantic values purposely displayed in my recent production … It is my hope that our interpretation has brought many people, particularly among the young, to a new understanding of this many-sided masterpiece.

  (Introduction, Anton Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard, a version by John Gielgud)

  40. Miss Arkádina starts eating vigorously. Sorin gives a loud laugh and gets up.

  41. Miss Arkádina says crossly1

  42. Sorin shakes his head and whistles comically.

  43. Sorin waves a hand and starts pacing the room.

  44. Sorin speaks a little ironically, as he walks round the table.

  45. Miss Arkádina cannot stand it any longer, she throws down her knife (a clatter of dishes on the table) and, like the thoroughly spoilt woman she is, bursts into tears.

  46. Miss Arkádina buries her face in a napkin and remains sitting motionless.

  47. Walking round the table, Sorin stops at the place where he had been sitting, finishes his glass of wine, then starts walking again.

  48. Miss Arkádina has calmed down, but she is still sniffling; to stop it, she pours herself out a glass of water and drinks.

  49. As he walks past her, Sorin stops and kisses her on the head.

  50. Sorin walks round the table a second time, but on reaching the chair in the foreground of the stage, he clutches at his head, puts a hand over his eyes (he feels dizzy), drops his walking stick and, groping for a chair, gets hold of it – the mimicry of his face changes – his head bends lower and lower, and if Miss Arkádina had not come to his aid, he would have fallen off the chair head foremost and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  51. Miss Arkádina jumps up from her chair and kneels in front of him. She lifts his head with difficulty and puts it on the table; she then runs to pour some water in a glass. At the same time a noise is heard in the front hall. That is Konstantín and Medvyédenko; they have entered, taken off their hats in the hall and are wiping their feet. Miss Arkádina shouts and waves to them. Konstantín runs in, followed by Medvyédenko. Konstantín takes the glass of water from Miss Arkádina and, filling his mouth with water, squirts it over Sorin. Sorin starts. Medvyédenko supports him (lifts Sorin’s head) and then feels his pulse. Miss Arkádina picks up Sorin’s walking stick.2

  52. Note to Sorin’s fainting fit: Sorin’s face looks as though he were dead. (This scene should be played as realistically as possible, so as to deceive the audience. It should be played in a way to convince the audience that Sorin was dying. That would greatly heighten the suspense of the audience and its interest in what is taking place on the stage.)

  53. Kneeling in front of Sorin, Konstantin fans him with a handkerchief, then helps him to wipe his wet face.

  54. A pause – Konstantín and Medvyédenko help Sorin to his feet. When Sorin stands up and is given his walking stick, he declares that he will go up to town.

  55. Sorin starts walking to the door, Medvyédenko supporting him. Konstantín remains in the same place, while Miss Arkádina accompanies Sorin to the door.

  56. Medvyédenko as he walks beside Sorin.

  57. Sorin bursts out laughing and, stopping, turns round to Konstantíin, let us say, so as to say the amusing phrase facing the audience, for otherwise it might be lost.

  58. Miss Arkádina accompanies Sorin to the door and then returns to the table: drinks water after her fright.

  59. Sitting down on the chair occupied by Sorin, Konstantin sprawls on it, stretching his legs over the other chair near him. He lies on two chairs, leaning against the table with his right elbow, and with his other against the back of the chair.

  60. A pause.

  61. Miss Arkádina stops drinking, puts the glass of water on the table, and throws an angry glance at Konstantín.

  62. Walks up and down between the cupboard and the table. A pause.

  63. Walks silently to the low sofa and gets the iodoform and some rags out of the medicine box over the sofa and a clean soup-plate from the sideboard. She then crosses over to Konstantin, moves away the plates, etc., and puts the soup-plate down on the table. Speaks of the doctor while walking from the sideboard to the table.

  64. Starts undoing the bandage carefully.

  65. Takes off the bandage and examines the wound.

  66. He kisses his mother’s hand while she is washing his wound.

  67. The whole of this scene must be acted with Miss Arkádina and Konstantín kept busy all the time, namely: Miss Arkádina fills a glass with water, pours it into the soup-plate, repeats the process, then shakes up the bottle of disinfectant, pours it into a large spoon and from the spoon into the soup-plate, mixing up the w
ater and the disinfectant in the plate. She then takes a rag, tears it, folds it up, and soaks it in the prepared liquid. She smooths out another folded rag, puts the first rag on his head, the second on top of it, and starts bandaging the head with a fresh roll of bandage. During all this operation, Konstantín is rolling up the old bandage.

  The Russian peasants were enslaved and tied to the master’s land only at the end of the sixteenth century by a decision of the Tsar Boris Gudonov.

  1.

  Underlined in ink. (S.B.).

  2.

  Grossed out: (Medvyédenko and Konstantin come in and wipe their feet on the floor. Miss Arkadina shouts to them. She has already run up to Sorin, who again collapses on top of her. She can hardly manage to hold him up.)

  6

  BERNARD SHAW 1856–1950

  1 CONTEXT

  As the prefaces to his plays vigorously assert, Shaw’s drama is concerned with current social issues. This is indeed a major distinguishing factor for all naturalistic drama; and Ibsen or Chekhov are as much critics of the status quo as Shaw. But Shaw’s focus is far more specific. Ibsen’s plays deal with the corruption of individuals under a hypocritical morality and repressive social system. Syphilis may surface in A Doll’s House and even be central to the action of Ghosts, but it is a physiological metaphor for this general moral state. By contrast, syphilis is the explicit subject of one of Eugène Brieux’s plays – and Shaw, who compared Brieux to Ibsen, used drama to campaign for specific reforms. Thus his first play, Widowers’ Houses, has a clearly identifiable subject: the exploitive practices of slum landlords and manipulation of the London County Council for their own profit. Although the door slams decisively at the end of A Doll’s House, the independence achieved by Ibsen’s heroine is a very uncertain quality, whereas Shaw claims that Widowers’ Houses is “deliberately intended to induce people to vote on the Progressive side at the next Council election in London” (Preface to Widowers’ Houses, 1893). Similarly, Chekhov documents the decay of the Russian establishment; and the hope for social change expressed by his characters is left undefined. By contrast, in Shaw’s version of The Cherry Orchard, bombs kill off the representatives of Capitalism, while the remaining characters actively cooperate in the coming destruction of their society (lighting up their house as a beacon for the bombers).

  The difference is in the degree of political commitment. Where Ibsen explicitly rejected all political programmes, and Chekhov reflected the ideological ferment of his time without comment, Shaw held strong socialist convictions. The history of Socialism in Britain is complicated. Engels owned factories in England; and Marx – who wrote his political treatises in the British Museum – based much of his analysis of Capitalism on British examples, and anticipated that the proletarian revolution would begin there. Yet Britain, which had been largely unaffected by the revolutions that swept the continent in 1848, remained far more stable than other European nations. This may partly be due to a strong utopian tendency in English radicalism, which found expression from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) through Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) to William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1892). But it was also a result of the Fabian movement, founded by Shaw, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant and others in 1884. Initially there were links between the Fabians and the revolutionary Social Democratic Federation, as well as the Socialist League (formed by William Morris, after disagreements with the leadership of the SDF). However, by 1886 the Fabians had broken with the anti-constitutional anarchists and Marxists of the Social Democratic League, and with the Socialist League, to pursue their line of evolutionary socialism.

  The Fabians took their name from the Roman general, Fabius Cunctator (the Delayer), who defeated Hannibal by evading battle until the invading Carthagians were worn down. After reading the first volume of Das Kapital in 1882, as Shaw later said, he Underwent a “complete conversion” to Marxism – but came to fear the “catastrophic policy for simultaneously destroying existing institutions and replacing them with a ready-made Utopia” on which class revolution was based. Instead the Fabian principle of “permeation” (in which key institutions would be infiltrated by socialists) offered a model of revolution that would be “gradual in its operations” (The Road to Equality, 1884). This gradualist position was confirmed by “Bloody Sunday” in November 1887, when a revolutionary march, organized by the SDF and addressed among others by Shaw – who called the outcome an “abjectly disgraceful defeat” – was violently crushed by police and troops around Trafalgar Square.

  The Fabian political position also has a direct relationship to his drama, since The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which in many ways forms a manifesto for his own plays, originated in a lecture Shaw presented to the Fabian Society (1890). This lecture used Ibsen’s naturalistic plays as a tool for attacking the “idealist Socialism” of the Marxists, particularly the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League; and in a passage omitted from the published version Shaw argued:

  With Ibsen’s thesis in one’s mind, it is impossible to think without concern of the appalling adaptability of Socialism to idealistic purposes … members whose entire devotion to the ideal of Socialism enables them to enlist under the red flag as revolutionary socialists without meaning anything whatever by the word. I know that many of my colleagues believe that we shall never enlist enthusiasm for our cause unless we, like the gentlemen in Pillars of Society, hold up the banner of the ideal. Socialism means practically the nationalization of land and capital, and nothing else. Yet we are told by our own members that we lay too much stress on the economic side of socialism … The idealist Socialist always rebels against a reduction of Socialism to practice.

  This “practical” approach, combined with the conviction that socialist reform is inevitable and as an evolutionary process requires gradual and orderly development, is well illustrated by Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw.

  6.1.1 Sidney Webb, Annie Besant: Fabian Socialism

  Fabian Essays in Socialism, 1889

  The Historic Basis of Socialism: Sidney Webb

  [W]e must take even more care to improve the social organism of which we form part, than to perfect our own individual developments. Or rather, the perfect and fitting development of each individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation of his own personality, but the filling, in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social machine. We must abandon the self-conceit of imagining that we are independent units, and bend our jealous minds, absorbed in their own cultivation, to this subjection to the higher end, the Common Weal. Accordingly, conscious “direct adaptation” steadily supplants the unconscious and wasteful “indirect adaptation” of the earlier form of the struggle for existence and with every advance in sociological knowledge, Man is seen to assume more and more, not only the mastery of “things”, but also a conscious control over social destiny itself.

  This new scientific conception of the Social Organism has put completely out of countenance the cherished principles of the Political Economist and the Philosophic Radical. We left them sailing gaily into Anarchy on the stream of Laisser Faire. Since then the tide has turned. The publication of John Stuart Mill’s “Political Economy” in 1848 marks conveniently the boundary of the old individualist Economics. Every edition of Mill’s book became more and more Socialistic. After his death the world learnt the personal history, penned by his own hand,1 of his development from a mere political democrat to a convinced Socialist.

  The change in tone since then has been such that one competent economist, professedly anti-Socialist,2 publishes regretfully to the world that all the younger men are now Socialists, as well as many of the older Professors. It is, indeed, mainly from these that the world has learnt how faulty were the earlier economic generalizations, and above all, how incomplete as guides for social or political action. These generalizations are accordingly now to be met with only in leading articles, sermons, or the speeches of Ministers or Bishops
.3 The Economist himself knows them no more.

  The result of this development of Sociology is to compel a revision of the relative importance of liberty and equality as principles to be kept in view in social administration. In Bentham’s celebrated “ends” to be aimed at in a civil code, liberty stands predominant over equality, on the ground that full equality can be maintained only by the loss of security for the fruits of labor. That exposition remains as true as ever; but the question for decision remains, how much liberty? Economic analysis has destroyed the value of the old criterion of respect for the equal liberty of others. Bentham, whose economics were weak, paid no attention to the perpetual tribute on the fruits of others’ labor which full private property in land inevitably creates. In his view liberty and security to property meant that every worker should be free to obtain the full result of his own labor; and there appeared no inconsistency between them. The political economist now knows that with free competition and private property in land and capital, no individual can possibly obtain the full result of his own labor. The student of industrial development, moreover, finds it steadily more and more impossible to trace what is precisely the result of each separate man’s toil. […] For he cannot escape the lesson of the century, taught alike by the economists, the statesmen, and the “practical men”, that complete individual liberty, with unrestrained private ownership of the instruments of wealth production, is irreconcileable with the common weal. The free struggle for existence among ourselves menaces our survival as a healthy and permanent social organism. Evolution, Professor Huxley declares, is the substitution of consciously regulated co-ordination among the units of each organism, for blind anarchic competition. Thirty years ago Herbert Spencer demonstrated the incompatibility of full private property in land with the modern democratic State; and almost every economist now preaches the same doctrine. The Radical is rapidly arriving, from practical experience, at similar conclusions; and the steady increase of the government regulation of private enterprise, the growth of municipal administration, and the rapid shifting of the burden of taxation directly to rent and interest, mark in treble lines the statesman’s unconscious abandonment of the old Individualism, and our irresistible glide into collectivist Socialism.