This play shows a concentration and ordering of detail in all departments of theatre only equal in Chekhov's playwriting to The Cherry Orchard. It was his strong alignment with a particular playhouse and company of actors which encouraged this development, and this was the first play he had written in its entirety with a fair confidence in how it was going to be handled in the theatre. Nemirovich-Danchenko commented, ‘Chekhov did something in his play that is usually censured by the shrewdest dramatic critics: he had written a play for definitely designated actors.’ But to satisfy so exact a skill as Chekhov was acquiring, we may rather praise than blame him for using the tools he knew.

The coming together of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko to found the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 was an event of major importance for the modern theatre. The happy accident of a dedicated theatre's finding its own playwright when the time was ripe for the new realism meant that Chekhov could establish his style and experiment within it with effects of oblique humour and submerged feeling which only he could conceive. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, having eliminated much of the older tradition of ‘projected’ acting and self-exhibition in their direction of The Seagull, had turned a failure into a success by maintaining a quality of theatrical honesty and a loyalty to the intentions of the play as a whole. Never had a dramatist more needed this kind of sympathetic treatment.

Critics still talk about a ‘definitive’ production, using the term not as a pejorative but as high praise. These commentaries are not an attempt to finalize some such imaginary entity as an ideal production. Like all great theatre, Chekhov will remain alive and self-renewing with each performance. In his case, this quality is notably linked with his objectivity as a dramatist.

For all his demand for accuracy in his abundance of detail, and his expectation that every detail should fit into an exact pattern, Chekhov's great plays can never suffer from petrified production. While he called for the most carefully planned ensemble work, at the same time he satisfied most adequately the drive of creative improvision dear to all good actors. Because his many details grow organically together, they challenge the stage every time to engender new life. We may go to the theatre hoping to see the definitive production of a Chekhov play, but this can never be. We shall always see something new in Chekhov, just as we do in Shakespeare.

Lillian Hellman explained the disagreements between Chekhov and his director very simply.

The Cherry Orchard, the supreme achievement of the naturalistic movement in the modern theatre, was Chekhov's last play. It was written and revised when its author was a dying man, his tuberculous condition forcing him to live in the milder air of Yalta on the Black Sea, six or seven hundred miles from rehearsals at the Moscow Art Theatre. Luckily, he had married Olga Knipper, one of the M.A.T.'s leading actresses, on 25 May 1901, and he and his wife corresponded freely about the details of the play, so that our first-hand knowledge of its author's intentions is very full.

Chekhov told Nemirovich-Danchenko that he had spent three years preparing the play, and it seems that he was already planning it during rehearsals for Three Sisters in 1901. Two years later he had only just begun to write, and the first draft was not finished until October 1903. This teasing and weighing of his material is characteristic of Chekhov at the end: he used this long period of gestation as Ibsen might have done, until, as he said, the play was completed in his head. It is clear, for example, that at the beginning he intended to make his play more of a light comedy, and he described it as a ‘Vaudeville’, a term synonymous with ‘farce’, although he may have been speaking idiosyncratically in order to emphasize his comic intentions to those who thought of him as a writer of tragedy.

Western tradition has accustomed us to thinking that great plays deal with larger-than-life people, important events, great experiences. Chekhov deals in the little things, the particulars that go to make up general experience; he leads us to the greater experience step by step by touching us with a thousand insights. It was the practising physician who wrote, ‘Details are also the thing in the sphere of psychology. God preserve us from generalizations.’ And writing about the characters in Ivanov he claimed, ‘I am telling you in all sincerity and in accordance with the dictates of my conscience that these people were born in my head and not out of ocean spray, or preconceived ideas, not out of “intellectuality”, and not by sheer accident. They are the result of observation and the study of life.’ It is, moreover, his immense particularity which makes him so stageworthy and such a joy to act.

Tracing Chekhov through his details and seeing how all the elements of his craft work together is an attempt to plumb the depth of his subtext. This kind of exegesis can never, of course, be complete, but I am not alone in finding that the usual methods of dramatic criticism – describing plot and character and theme – are inadequate to realize the texture and density and the ‘experience’ of a Chekhov play.

There is a clarity of vision in Uncle Vanya not present in The Seagull. The broad divisions between the generations in The Seagull invited moral judgments too easily; in Uncle Vanya, Chekhov risks the comfort of his audience in teaching them to understand his characters without sentimentality, to recognize individuality. He pursues this purpose with a precision and honesty which subjects him as a playwright to a fiercer discipline, and his dramaturgy to a radical reform. The uncertain response of the first Moscow audiences to the play testifies to the extremes to which Chekhov now goes in reducing conventional theatricality.

Working over his own material in The Wood Demon of 1889, Chekhov deliberately evokes a tawdry, provincial world, with mostly trivial, mediocre people living in it. It is rural Russia again, but this time wholly without glamour. Chekhov subtitles his play Scenes from Country Life, a title borrowed from Alexander Ostrovsky. In fact, Uncle Vanya in 1897 takes a big step towards realizing the naturalistic ideal of drama as documentary, one which neither Ibsen nor Strindberg chose to take. In letting actuality seem to speak for itself, Chekhov also makes a clean break with the Russian tradition of didactic purpose in writing for the stage.

The story of The Seagull's production reads like a fairy-tale. Jottings in Chekhov's notebooks after 1891 suggest that the play was a long time in conception. Ivanov (1887) had been an unexpected success in Moscow and St Petersburg; the more naturalistic play The Wood Demon (1889), however, was a total failure in Moscow. The former was a success with the public because it was more closely modelled after the kind of melodrama which was common throughout Europe at that time; the latter was a failure because Chekhov had discarded too many of those theatrical conventions the audience expected. Six years were to pass before he settled to write a long play again, six years in which he could debate with himself how far he dare press upon his audiences a more realistic and objective theatre. Thus F. A. Korsh, the theatre manager, could not believe that a man could shoot himself, as Konstantin Treplev does, without first making a speech about it. It is hard for us today to see what simple, but fundamental, issues Chekhov had to face.

In 1895, at his newly acquired farm estate at Melikhovo near Moscow, he began work on the new play. All of Chekhov's plays are ‘country’ plays rather than city ones, and the last ones must owe something to life on a country estate where people are forced upon each other's company. It is said that he wrote the first draft in four weeks and read it to the party at Melikhovo.

EARLY NATURALISM

Naturalism in the theatre is hardly the invention of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, but its vigorous exploitation by these great dramatists marks the resuscitation of European drama in the second half of the nineteenth century. With its emergence and astonishing progress over a short period, the dark tones are heard again for the first time since the seventeenth century.

‘Naturalism’ as a dramatic convention should be distinguished from ‘realism’, the content of the drama. Euripides, in trying to reproduce more commonplace human feelings, lays claim to being a great realist, though his plays are founded on the most artificial set of stage conventions Western drama has known. Hamlet investigates the mind and spirit of man with deeper psychological realism than the theatre had known before, but only because the free Elizabethan pattern of action and the supremacy of the soliloquy permitted it. Shaw is an outstanding realist in the sense that he directs all his art against the romantic attitudes of his contemporaries, but he nevertheless writes as mannered a comedy as he pleases.