Chekhov’s Plays as the Basis of Metatheatral Performances in the 2010s

Abstract

Chekhov’s drama has retained its constant popularity throughout the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century and has an unbroken scenic history. In modern theater it performs several functions: 1) of a literary basis for theatrical action, carefully preserved by the director (traditionalist approach); 2) of a kind of material that can and should be adapted, modernized, adjusted to the urgent range of acute problems and to today’s scenic language (avant-garde, post-dramatic approach). One might argue that Chekhov’s drama transitions into the category of “proto-text” or “metatext”. Productions of Chekhov’s plays are often the ones that become the realm of the most radical theatrical experiments when their “familiar” “proto-text”, their basis and foundation are, so to speak, factored out from them: his drama remains in the domain of literature, of reader’s attention while the theater moves ahead – into the area of new scenic opportunities which are only tangentially related to literature. Chekhov’s word is reduced, washed out or even completely disappears, being substituted by other theatrical languages. The article examines the most vivid examples of recent theatrical productions, demonstrating the attitude to Chekhov’s drama as a kind of “proto-text” or “metatext”. The authors have limited themselves to two Chekhov’s plays – The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters which on the semantic level are linked primarily by the acute sense of apocalyptism that directors often draw to the forefront and show explicitly. These are, among others, productions of Okolo (Director Yuri Pogrebnichko), Alexandrinsky theatre (Director Andriy Zholdak), Krasny Fakel (Novosibirsk, Director Timothy Kulyabin), Kolyada-Theatre (Ekaterinburg, Director Nikolai Kolyada), the opera Three Sisters by Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös (Ekaterinburg, Director Christopher Alden). A lot of these performances also employ other Chekhov’s texts which results in a new cento-play characterized by implicit resonance with a number of plays making one think of Chekhov’s drama as of a cycle or a single drama in four acts. In such pervasive theatrical palimpsest Chekhov’s drama appears as the essence and symbol of theatre. © 2021 Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philology. All Rights Reserved.