The BroadwayWorld Beginner's Guide to: Chekhov

When Anton Chekhov was a medical student, he dissected cadavers to learn about the human body; when Anton Chekhov was a playwright, he dissected characters to learn about the human mind.

Chekhov is not for me

He might not be - but unlike Shakey, there are only four plays really, so it's not like you have to try a tragedy, a comedy, a history, a problem play, one probably written by someone else and one done for a bet with Kit Marlowe. And there are no women dressed as men and men dressed as women to really hilarious Benny Hillish effect. Chekhov had no lulls as a playwright because he had a real job and was dead at 44 - that's 27 in theatre years.

And you can go in with no preconceived ideas from grimly formal school curricula dedicated to replacing the joyful chaos of Elizabethan theatre with the grim calculus of academic assessment. Sure there's a bit of acclimatising to the Russian names, but these people live, they love, they're cruel, they're funny and they ache with a sense of disorientation that is curiously uplifting - because they show us that we are not alone.

I don't know anything about Chekhov

Actually, I was being disingenuous earlier - there is a tragedy, a comedy and a history but they're within each play. More than any other playwright's work, you can find what you want, nay, what you need, in Chekhov. His stuff is for you because he knows you better than you do.

In the stalls, one wants to tell the actors to take five and let us breathe a little, catch up on this torrent of perception breaking over the fourth wall. Simultaneously, great tides of history and philosophy wash over the stage - modernism, class conflict, environmentalism, ethics, property rights, slavery, gender and inter-generational conflict, family strife, friendship, enmity - yet everything is so personal. You're as torn by the trauma of unrequited love as ever you would be reading Jane Austen; as guilty in laughing at the antics of an unfortunate clown as in any Chaplin comedy; as moved by the psychological cages people build for themselves as you are knowing anyone hobbled by their insecurities.

You do know plenty about Chekhov - you just don't know it yet.

I don't understand the language, the customs, the politics

Chekhov is, in every sense, Russian: the long arm of winter is never far away. The rigid class hierarchy, though stretched to breaking point, is still the armature on which the plays are constructed; there's a formidable volume of alcohol consumed.

But the themes are universal and, Russia being Russia, enhanced. Sadness is deeper, loss (more accurately, potential loss) felt more keenly, destiny more capricious. This is an uncrowded world - one of vast forests or endless plains, of relentless skies, of time both hanging heavy (as something must be found to fill the hours), but also imperceptibly sliding through the fingers until a whole life has gone, wasted on plans never quite made, intentions never quite voiced, love never quite confessed.

We live in remarkably similar times, but our endless plains are the hundreds of TV channels, our skies the internet that looms above us with its own Cloud. The pandemic has brought days that melt one into the next with the nagging feeling that they don't really count in lockdown time, but also that unease that one is a year closer to 30, 60, 80 and achieved nothing. We can't even get to the West End, never mind Moscow.

I don't know where to start

In the theatre is the short answer. The claustrophobic tension that Chekhov builds is dissipated on film, where everything is too sunny, everyone has straight teeth and bright eyes and you half-expect Bertie Wooster and Jeeves to hove into view hot-footing it from the Drones Club pursued by a creditor.

That said, the TV adaptation of Conor McPherson's recent updated Uncle Vanya (reviewed here) captures the theatrical experience well, with Toby Jones finding plenty of humour in the eponymous anti-hero and the women placed at the centre of the action (see trailer for it below). Nine years ago, I saw Game of Thrones' Iain Glen give a more angry Vanya (reviewed here) - as one of theatre's great parts, you do tend to see great actors taking it on. And if British polity's central psephological question is Hampstead vs Hartlepool - it's all in Vanya.

The Three Sisters longing for Moscow feels very much of our time, but it was also of our time four years ago when I reviewed it at the Union Theatre. We're all desperate to be freed from our bubbles, but how will we react once the great day arrives? Like the sisters, will we find reasons to stay at home with Netflix and Just Eat, even if we're no longer confined by law, just by our fragile psyches - after all, it's been a while! And if we don't visit that high street, that corner shop, that local theatre, will someone less encumbered sweep it out from under our feet and put up a parking lot?

The Cherry Orchard (reviewed here) pits the old ways of a complacent elite against the new morality of an upstart who simply wants it more and isn't too concerned about how he gets it - it's his turn after all. Build Back Better you say? How's that public money for private bidders working out with Dido's dodgy £37bn Track and Trace? There'll be old ways and new ways of using land when there are contracts to be won, red wall seats to be defended and favours to be offered and received - t'was ever thus.

The Seagull gets shot (and Chekhov gets his gun) in the first of the fab four plays on which his reputation lies. Here the comedy is darkest - not just because you know about the gun - but because Chekhov veered more to the pathetic than he did later. It's so sad (reviewed here) that the laughs can shrivel in your throat and leave you metaphorically slapping your wrist - until you laugh again a minute later. It's all a bit meta too, which will appeal to the students the playwright routinely skewers in his texts. (Below: trailer for the recent film adaptation starring Annette Bening and Saoirse Ronan)

Each of these four plays is performed regularly in a variety of adaptations and venues - do see one once you can, and we'll discuss it over a bowl of cherries and vodka shots some day soon.

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