Theatre Chro·nicle
THE RUSSIAN SOUL
In reviewing the current version of
The Three Sisters,
the New York
drama critics, almost to a man, congratulated Miss Cornell on her all-star
production and deplored her choice of play. What integrity, what gen·
erosity, what talent, and all, alas, wasted on an inferior play by a
dramatist whom we all revere but who, it must be confessed, seems dull
and bookish in these stirring times. The general impression was that
Miss Cornell in her devotion to art had committed an act of desperate,
if
winning folly; like a great lady who loves the poor so much that she
gives away her fortune to a beggar on the street. This inversion of values
is a phenomenon that appears regularly at the revival of any classic, with
the eternal exception of
Hamlet. Hamlet,
it is conceded, is a play for
the stage: it is, in fact,
the
play for the stage; the other classics belong
in the library, where the scholarly critic can study them at leisure-in
the dramatic perspective of
The Eve of St. Mark.
The fact is, of course, that
The Three Sisters
is not an inferior
play of Chekhov, at least not strikingly so;
it
is earlier and cruder than
The Cherry Orchard,
but it is, on the other hand, more mature than
The Sea Gull,
and since Chekhov wrote only five full-length plays the
choice was not a wide one. The fact is also that Miss Cornell, whose
devotion to art is indeed painfully sincere, has given us a production that
erupts heavily, like a slow volcano, over the topography of the play, so
that the playgoer who would like to know what Chekhov was doing here
must perform a considerable work of archaeology. There are intimations,
it is true, of the original Chekhovian landscape, particularly in the per–
formance of Tom Powers as the school-teacher, Kuligin, and the text
itself survives as a map. Leaving aside questions of talent-for Ruth
Gordon as Natasha gives a striking, even terrifying performance that is
nevertheless as injurious to the play's values as Miss Cornell's awkward
and sentimental Masha-the main difficulty is that American actors
cannot understand why Chekhov called many of his plays comedies. To
the American theatre mind, a play that culminates in disastrous events
is, by definition, a tragedy; the murder in the last act gives the director
his clue.
If
you add to this the fact that the characters are unhappy, it
is plain sailing! The funereal note is struck in the opening speech and
the play is driven-at a respectable speed-to its last resting-place in
the fourth act. The critics then join the mourners in lamenting the fact
that the play is dead.
Mme. Litvinoff (an Englishwoman) remarked to newspaper reporters
that
The Three Sisters
is an absurd play about three grown-up women
who spend four acts not going to Moscow when they have the price of
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