The Seagull—Anton Chekhov
One dead tern deserves another
Last week, I referred to Chekhov’s play The Seagull, as a comedy. Silly me. The full title, The Seagull: A Comedy in Four Acts, somehow led me to expect something like The Importance of Being Ernest, or Charlie’s Aunt. Maybe I should have thought more along the lines of The Divine Comedy. If the audience for the play’s debut in 1896 had had expectations similar to mine, I could see why it flopped. Its humor consists of high-level meta-theatre jokes and personal jabs. I suppose he deliberately violated every audience expectation he could think of, even to the extent of ending a supposed comedy with a suicide. Donald Rayfield, in Anton Chekhov: A Life, quotes from one of Chekhov’s letters, describing the work in progress, “I am writing it not without pleasure, though I offend stage rules terribly. A comedy, three female parts, six male, four acts, landscape (view of a lake); a lot of talk about literature, not much action, 13 stone of love.” (Thirteen stone would be about 182 pounds). Rayfield asserts that many lines in the play come straight from other writers and that Chekhov meant the introduction of the dead seagull in act two as a dig at Ibsen’s 1884 play, The Wild Duck. Would it have occurred to anyone to chuckle at Ibsen when Treplev throws a dead bird at Nina’s feet and announces that he just killed it and will soon kill himself the same way? Hard to say.
In terms of its comedic quality, The Seagull seemed like one of those ideas we sometimes get late at night that sound hilarious after a few drinks, but doesn’t seem so great the next day. Some comedies, for example, involve a pair of lovers at cross purposes. In Chekhov’s hands we have instead, as Rayfield so succinctly puts it,“an absurdly long chain of unrequited love – nobody loves the schoolteacher Medvedenko, who loves Masha, the manager’s daughter, who loves Treplev, the young writer, who loves Nina, the neighbor’s stepdaughter, who loves Trigorin, the older writer, who is in thrall to Arkadina, the actress.” Probably funnier in the telling than in the acting, right? Rayfield continues, “Anton did all he could from conception in May 1895 until its first performance in October 1896, to stir up the hostility of those who had to watch and act his play.”
Anyone expecting to see a clearly defined conflict in the first act would find themselves totally confused. Anyone expecting rising action or a fast-paced plot would probably walk out by the end of act two. However, this early play of Chekhov’s, in fact, broke new ground in theater, and only two years after its initial flop, when presented by the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, it met with great success, and it has continued to please audiences ever since. I strongly suspect the initial failure and subsequent success came from staging it first as a comedy and later as a drama.
The play opens as Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev, an aspiring young playwright, prepares to stage an experimental play he has written. Friends, relatives, and locals gather to watch the amateur production. Treplev’s totally new type of drama defies all previous forms with its daring originality. For one thing, it incorporates the actual sunset instead of a backdrop, making it essential that the play start on time. For another thing, as the sole actress points out,
Nina: It’s hard to act in your play. There are no live characters.
Treplev: Live characters!. We must represent life not the way it is, and not the way it should be, but as we see it in our dreams.
Nina: There is little action in your play; just reciting. And I think a play must always have love in it.
Chekhov packed a quite a bit of irony in this play within a play. For one thing, Chekhov himself defies the norms of drama by presenting life unvarnished, not in an improved or dreamlike version. His characters speak naturally to each other about seemingly trivial matters. They react and prevaricate naturally, so the audience must read between the lines to understand their motivations, without the characters always explaining their real feelings to the audience or to each other. The conflicts don’t involve intrigue, or theft, or murder, but consist entirely of psychological conflicts, such as envy, resentment, or artistic aspirations. Characters do not sort themselves out into neat categories like hero, villain, victim, or trickster. They don’t have obvious tics or mannerisms that reappear like leitmotifs whenever they enter. Masha, for example, takes snuff a few times in act one, but when Dorn irritably grabs the snuffbox from her and tosses it away, the snuff doesn’t reappear in later acts. Audiences expect conflicts to erupt into violence on the stage. But the only tensions that boil over quickly simmer down, and the only act of violence, the suicide, takes place—off stage.
Chekhov frequently used details drawn from his meticulous observations of those around him, which he kept in notebooks as does Trigorin. Not surprisingly, his friends or relatives often recognized themselves, and they didn’t always take it as flattery.
Whereas many other plays keep up a frenetic pace of dialogue, carefully avoiding any dead time on stage, Chekhov makes as substantial a use of silence as a composer might. I noted last week how characters in the Mahābhārata often pause before answering a question. In The Seagull, Chekhov uses the pauses, not so much to indicate reflective judgment, but to capture the ebb and flow of conversations in which complex but unspoken psychological dramas unfold as subtext.
I remember having a huge insight many years ago when trying to understand a long pause in the Kurosawa film, Dersu Uzala. When someone leaves the room to look for Uzala, they take what seems like a long time, during which those remaining in the room just stand there, awkwardly silent. As a typical American moviegoer, I found that scene totally incomprehensible. Why doesn’t someone say something or do something? And why does the dead air last for so long? Chip, the compiler of the Decade List gently explained, “Kurosawa gives you time to feel.” Yes. Exactly! Hollywood directors have never trusted their audiences to have their own feelings. From the beginning of cinema, they have dictated exactly what the audience should focus on, hear, notice, think, or feel. From rapid cutting to closeups to romantic music scores, directors took total control of the minds of the audience. When characters in American films walk down a long hallway, directors would either edit out the middle of the walk, or they would break it into two-second takes, and cut back and forth from different points of view. A European director, on the other hand, might use a stationary camera and have the actor walk towards it, letting the audience feel the emotional tension as best they can, unaided.
Chekhov actually writes the pauses into the script as stage directions, not just for the realism, but to let the audience feel between the lines.
We don’t get a conventional plot in The Seagull, but we do get a thoughtful exploration of how normal people cope with creativity. Chekhov seems to give no credence to the myth of creative genius. He presents us with characters who passionately devote their lives to writing or acting, yet possess only a mediocre talent. He also presents us with successful, established artists who have simply mastered conventional practices. He presents us with ambiguous characters, about whom we may not know what to think. Trigorin, for instance, we don’t particularly like, yet he bears a strong resemblance to Chekhov himself. While we may find ourselves sympathizing with Treplev and Nina, their modest successes come not from talent but from dogged persistence.
Since the play’s first performance, many people have translated, adapted, staged, or filmed The Seagull. To mention just a couple, Tennessee Williams translated and freely adapted it as The Notebook of Trigorin in 1981, and Tom Stoppard had a go at it in 1997. Sidney Lumet adapted it into a film, The Sea Gull (1968), with Vanessa Redgrave as Nina and James Mason as Trigorin. It became an opera (1974), a country musical set in Nashville (Songbird, in 2015), and a ballet (2002). I can’t vouch for the quality of any of these efforts.
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Next week, I will follow up this Chekhov play with another, Uncle Vanya. I’m halfway through the second volume of the Mahābhārata, so I won’t be ready to say anything about that for another week. Meanwhile, Naomi Kanakia continues plowing through it and offering her wonderful insights in the Woman of Letters Substack page.
Thank you for reading these struggles to understand great literature. I hope you enjoy the spectacle. Welcome also to the new subscribers and followers who have joined this last week.
So did American movie producers condition Americans to impatience or was it already baked in? It seems American movie-goers are all about the entertainment, not the art. The let's-get-on-with-it mentality causes us to lose the opportunities art affords for consideration of the depths of humanity. What's a good consumer of art to do? Art is a balancing act: too much reflection time risks the assessment that it's too slow (boring,) but too little avoids depth and meaning.