For a week this January a galaxy of British theatre people and writers gathered at the Hampstead Theatre to perform, read and talk about Chekhov. They were not just celebrating his one hundred and fiftieth birthday, they were raising funds to carry out direly needed repairs to Chekhov’s house in Yalta and secure its long- term survival (see www.yaltachekhov.org). Every evening sold out. But then, in Irving Wardle’s words, Chekhov is ‘Britain’s second favourite, and most loved, dramatic author’.
As someone who has translated and written about Chekhov, I am often asked why this is so. When I edited a book that examined in detail the past and present of Chekhov productions in Britain, a reviewer expostulated that it was all very well but I had not explained why ‘such an intensely Russian writer’ had found ‘so much posthumous acclaim among the English at their most English’.
I cannot answer such questions. They seem to invite me to compare ‘Chekhov’ with ‘Britishness/Englishness’ and say what they have in common. But in the first place we can never define our own self. Possibly people from outside our culture can do this for us, although the attempts I have seen in this particular case feel superficial. Secondly, these questions posit quasi-metaphysical concepts such as ‘Chekhov’ and ‘Englishness’ that ring hollow. It is far more instructive, in my experience, to probe the facts of how Chekhov’s plays conquered the British stage: this can challenge our own assumptions.
For example, there is a common belief that Chekhov’s début in English was with The Cherry Orchard at London’s Aldwych Theatre in 1911. This may be because nearly half the audience left in the interval and the fiasco satisfyingly parallels the spectacular flop of The Seagull’s opening night in Russia (1896). However, Chekhov’s true début on the British stage was not in London, it was in Glasgow two years earlier. Astonishingly, this 1909 production of The Seagull was an artistic, critical, and even financial success. It fact, unlike the 1911 Cherry Orchard, it was a model of how to introduce a perplexing foreign dramatist to the great, conservative British theatre!
The Glasgow Seagull, which opened on 2 November 1909, was both translated and directed by George Calderon, an English polymath who lived and wrote at Hampstead between 1900 and 1915. He was in Russia at the time of the play’s première and got so under the skin of Russian life that when he returned his friends said he even looked Russian. The documentary evidence suggests that he translated The Seagull after returning to Hampstead from a visit to Tahiti in 1906 – the same year that Constance Garnett began translating The Cherry Orchard. Calderon read widely in Russian about Chekhov and understood the ‘form’ of a Chekhov play, which he said was not naturalistic but poetic, ‘centrifugal not self-centred’, ‘tragedy with the texture of comedy’. He gave a public lecture about Chekhov in Glasgow on 29 October 1909, the published text of which was described in The Times by the American Russianist Lyon Phelps as ‘the most subtle and penetrating essay on the Russian dramatist anywhere’. Unlike most ‘translators’ in our theatre today, Calderon understood Chekhov’s play in the original.
But Calderon was also a theatre man to his fingertips. He had acted as an undergraduate at Oxford, was a very competent playwright, a great improviser and mimic, and had thoroughly absorbed the Moscow Arts approach to directing and acting. As the average Edwardian actor ‘opens his mouth to speak’, Calderon wrote, ‘the rest fall petrified into an uncanny stillness, like the courtiers about the Sleeping Beauty’; whereas what Chekhov’s plays required was acting in which ‘the whole company keeps continuously alive’. Like Stanislavsky, he meticulously choreographed his Seagull before rehearsals began and was in continuous dialogue with his actors. According to Mrs Calderon’s memoirs, he reduced the young Irene Clark to tears as he worked with her to attain ‘the concentrated passion needed for the role of Nina at the end of the play’. He was more like a modern theatre director than an Edwardian ‘producer’.
However good a translator-director, though, Calderon would have failed had he not had an outstanding company. Alfred Wareing (who invented the Arts Council) was years ahead of his time as a theatre manager: he had persuaded private backers to let him create a repertory company in Glasgow that would develop Scottish drama and perform modern work from Ibsen, Shaw and Granville Barker to Galsworthy, Hankin and Calderon himself, and he rejected the ‘star system’ in favour of ensemble-playing with very good actors. ‘It says much for the company that they presented so good an ensemble’, wrote The Stage on 4 November 1909. Even the quality of The Seagull’s sets was praised.
It also says much for Glasgow in 1909 that its theatre was the first in the English-speaking world to give stage-room to Chekhov. In England Shaw, Galsworthy, Bennett and others who admired Chekhov’s plays despaired of them finding commercial producers. But Glasgow was far more cosmopolitan and avant- garde than the British capital. In 1901 it had hosted the International Exhibition, at which Chekhov’s architect friend Franz Shekhtel created a sensation with his Russian pavilions. In Russia, Glasgow’s genius Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the most popular foreign designer of Art Nouveau.
Calderon’s full-length comedy The Fountain had been well received in the same theatre the week before. On the opening night of Chekhov’s English-language première, the Royalty Theatre was full and the audience responsive. Sometimes they ‘found themselves puzzled’ and ‘tittered at wrong moments’ (Evening Times), but they gave the whole an ‘enthusiastic reception’ (Glasgow News). For someone experiencing The Seagull for the very first time in English, the Herald’s critic saw far: ‘The futility of life and effort is strongly borne in on one, but the play is illumined by comedy, and its humanity is so warm and appealing that it somehow touches and interests more than it depresses.’ The houses were good at the remaining five performances and the run grossed about £13,000 at today’s prices – not bad for what has often been regarded as a ‘fringe’ production.
All his life Calderon was a risk-taker; and his carefully prepared gamble with Chekhov in Scotland had paid off. In England, however, it was a different matter.
Constance Garnett was not remotely a person of the theatre, but she was a close friend of Bernard Shaw, who was a big shot in the Incorporated Stage Society. Both were Fabians. Calderon could be described as a radical Conservative. For instance, in 1908 he had been Chairman of the Women’s National Anti- Suffrage League, and he was apt to mock Shaw’s demonisation of ‘the Wicked Rich’. Shaw saw to it that it was Constance Garnett’s translation that was used for the Incorporated Stage Society’s British première of The Cherry Orchard in 1911. Afterwards, a friend of Garnett’s overheard Calderon telling the Chairman of the Society’s Council of Management that Garnett’s version was ‘wretched’ and ‘now no-one would be willing to take up a Tchehov play anywhere’. Garnett wrote to her husband: ‘this makes me feel that I should like to publish my Cherry Orchard at once and shall not for a moment consider Calderon’s feelings’.
This particular race Calderon won: his translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, with his seminal essay on Chekhov, were brought out in February 1912, whereas Garnett’s versions of twelve Chekhov plays had to wait until 1923. A performance of Calderon’s Seagull in London on 31 March 1912, with Chekhov’s former lover Lydia Yavorskaya playing Nina, was so precarious that Calderon boycotted it. It was the last production of a Chekhov translation by him in his lifetime. Three years later he lost the biggest gamble – he called it ‘adventure’ – of his life, when he inveigled the British Army into enlisting him at the age of forty- five and was killed at Gallipoli.
Gradually, Constance Garnett’s versions of Chekhov’s plays superseded Calderon’s, just as his own plays were forgotten. But he made two vital contributions to establishing Chekhov on the British stage without which the plays’ popularity today would be unthinkable. In 1925 J. B. Fagan directed a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Oxford Playhouse (the young Gielgud played Trofimov). Calderon’s translation was chosen, possibly because Calderon was an ‘Oxford man’ himself. This production was successful, and transferred to the Lyric at Hammersmith for the first commercial run of a Chekhov play in London. Without it, the first full-blown, West End production of Chekhov would not have happened when it did, which was Komisarjevsky’s 1936 Seagull in a version probably based on Garnett’s.
The Hampstead adventurer George Calderon launched Chekhov’s English- language stage career in 1909 with The Seagull because it was ‘easy, entraînant, not much unlike a Western play’. He was right: by the 1970s The Seagull was Chekhov’s most popular play in Britain, partly because it became a favourite for drama school productions. And here, perhaps, we can link Chekhov’s popularity to something specific in our culture. Perhaps we love The Seagull because it is about acting, and the whole world seems to agree that our culture is particularly theatrical. The Seagull holds a very strong attraction for artists beginning their careers (Nina, Treplev) and those that have ‘made it’ (Arkadina, Trigorin). It explores what authentic acting and authentic theatre-writing are, and these are issues dear to our heart.
Though few present probably realised it, it was strangely appropriate that Chekhov’s one hundred and fiftieth birthday should be celebrated in England at Hampstead.