44
PARTISAN REVIEW
Heartbreak House-even,
in Shaw's best work which prevent him from
equalling the best of Chekhov. Yet
Heartbreak House,
one of his greatest
plays, compares very well, I think, with
The Sea Gull,
one of Chekhov's
worst. In
Heartbreak House
the vastness and nobility of the conception,
the eloquence of the style, redeem the occasional thinness of the
characterization, while the sentimental triviality of Chekhov's theme
tends to debase the value of his most acute and poignant observations.
The o'lder people in
The Sea Gull,
the successful writer, the actress, the
unhappy spinster who drinks, the invalid landowner are among the best
shabby-genteel portraits in Chekhov's gallery, but the young people,
with whom the plot is really concerned, are melodramatic figures seen
at a distance through a mist of tears. The commonplace character of
the plot, which tells of a young girl's "ruin" at the hands of a vain and
selfish older man, and of her young lover's ·consequent suicide, is not
improved by the "poetic" analogy drawn between the girl and a sea
gull shot by a bored sportsman. The difficulty is that the girl's degrada.
tion is not directly observed but summed up in its tritest outlines by one
of the characters, and the inner motivation for the boy's collapse is never
given. The real story takes place offstage.
It
is not properly incorporated
in the play, and the playwright, consequently, is demanding sympathy for
his characters on what are artistically false pretenses. The final irony by
which Chekhov makes the novelist forget both the significance he himself
had attributed to the sea gull and the fact that he had ordered it to be
stuffed, is an extremely vulgar concession to the conventional demands
for neatness in playwriting, a concession which Chekhov in his later
plays would never have made.
The acting of the Guild company was such as to draw a clean line
between what is meretricious and what is good in the play. Both
of the young people were bad. The girl was merely pallid, but Richard
Whorf's Constantine was a kind of museum of horrors, containing all
the cliches and curiosities of juvenile acting. The older people were, on
the whole, good, ranging from the excellence of Margaret Webster as
the ironic Masha, through the skill and frequent insight of Alfred Lunt's
Trigorin, the solidity of Sydney Greenstreet's Peter Sorin, down to the
slick overacting of Lynn Fontanne's Arkadina.
Stark Young's sharp and unaffected translation cleared away a
great many of the cobwebs which one had
prev~ously
thought to
be
part of Chekhov, but which prove merely to have clung to the styles of
his earlier translators. It is to be hoped that Mr. Young will next devote
himself to one of Chekhov's more mature plays.
