Stanislavsky's production of Chekhov's three sisters

Nick Worrall

pp. 1-32

in: Robert Russell, Andrew Barratt (eds), Russian theatre in the age of modernism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

It is interesting to speculate as to why, in the Soviet Union, there was no major revival of any Chekhov play between Konstantin Stanislavsky's first productions (staged between 1898 and 1904) and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko's production of Three Sisters ("Tri sestry" staged in 1940 — at a time when the Moscow Art Theatre was being officially promulgated as a model of 'socialist—realist" and "anti-formalist" theatrical practice. Why was it that, during roughly the same period, several productions of Chekhov's major plays were staged throughout Western Europe as well as in the United States of America? The answer would appear to lie in the historical significance of the Russian Revolution which, in philosophical terms, was founded on the notion of a non-tragic universe where human beings could intervene meaningfully in determining their own fate. In a Soviet world, the problems of three provincial sisters who, between them, possessed the price of a ticket, could well have been resolved by a trip to the nearest railway station. The predicament of Chekhov's heroines could no longer be sustained within those existentialist terms which can now be seen, in retrospect, to have anticipated specific forms of European "absurdist" drama where waiting for "Godot" can be construed as a simple imaginative extension of waiting for "Moscow".