THE SEAGULL & UNCLE VANYA

Author: Anton Chekhov
Year: 1967 (1896 & 1897)
Publisher: Gebers Förlag AB
Language: Swedish (translator Jarl Hemmer)

A dead seagull at the feet of a confused young actress. Shot out of boredom and spite. Red blood seeping from its still heart onto its snow-white plumage. Its eyes wide open reveal nothing. Maybe because there is nothing to reveal. A receptacle devoid of content. A body without spirit.

This is the scene in Anton Chekhov’s play “Måsen” (“The Seagull”) where the shooter, Konstantin, and the young actress Nina go their separate ways after a short romance. He is passionate about the future. She is in love with the past. They can never truly know each other. He goes on to become a celebrated playwright of avantgarde drama, she is seduced by an elderly writer past his prime and gives birth to his child before being abandoned and shamed. “Måsen” is a play about the new challenging the old but also about humility challenging pride. Chekhov wants to show us how hard it is to create beauty and how easily it is ruined.

The second play in this short volume is “Onkel Vanja” (“Uncle Vanya”), another one of Chekhov’s most famous works. The mansion inhabited by professor Serebryakov and his young second wife along with his deceased first wife’s mother, brother (Vanya) and niece, is the ideal setting for a perfect storm. All the disappointment, disenchantment, and grievance on the side of Vanya toward his brother-in-law, whom he once revered, is like a powder keg about to explode. Vanya came many years earlier to the mansion to help his sister and her husband run it while the latter was still alive and the former was busy with his research. After her passing, Vanya stayed on and continued to run the estate, growing increasingly dissatisfied with his mission.

Anton Chekhov’s greatness is in his skilful construction of the dialogue as a way of developing his characters and the relationship between them. Whereas the engine in many playwrights’ works before his is a misunderstanding (comedies) or deceit (tragedies), the force that propels Chekhov’s plays is the impossible reconciliation of individual desire and ambition. Every person on stage is essential to the plot and to the message that Chekhov is trying to convey. No villain is necessary in either “Måsen” or “Onkel Vanja”. Fate and society are quite enough.  

Chekhov’s importance to the modernist revolution in late 19^th century modernist theatre can hardly be overstated and the school he established spread across Europe and the British Isles. Most famously, George Bernard Shaw implicitly dedicated his play “Heartbreak House” to Chekhov by the subtitle “A Fantasy in the Russian manner on English Themes”. It probably also widely known that Chekhov repeatedly argued about the minimalist storytelling technique where everything that is placed on stage needs to serve a purpose: known as Chekhov’s gun. If a gun is shown in the first act, the principle goes, it needs to go off before the end of the last, alternatively, if it does not go off, that in itself must be a significant turn of events in the plot.

Reading plays is in many respects different from reading novels. There is no narrator, descriptions are scant, and the setting implicit. All there is, essentially, is the dialogue. Exclusively external. When one reads a stage play, one must try to imagine the emotions, the gestures, the voices, deducing it all from the lines and the context. The work is intended to be performed, not read. This transfers the burden from the director and the actors to the reader. Often with poor results.

Although, I have never seen a play by Chekhov performed live on stage, after having read “Måsen” and “Onkel Vanja”, I am confident that the experience of these works would be ten times more potent had I enjoyed it from the stand at a theatre. Knowing what a play is about is one thing. Feeling it something altogether different.