Theatre Scene and Trends

Although Chekhov is not the most performed playwright on the German stage, no other is charged with such meaning

In 1965 Jan Kott published his famous book Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Were Kott still alive to ask himself to which long-dead figure the theater today feels itself drawn as if to a contemporary, he would have to replace Shakespeare with Chekhov.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov – a Russian writer born on 29 January 1860 in the provinces, who wrote in his forty-four years of life very many short stories but only a few plays – has become the German dramatist. In recent years his plays have been performed in German-speaking countries as if they were, quite simply, the dramatic gospel. Although Chekhov is not the most performed playwright on the German stage, no other is charged with such meaning, and no ambitious theater program and no Berlin Theatertreffen of the last ten years that has been without at least one of his plays. Chekhov is the German theater’s fountain of youth, and he is its crux.

We no longer need the ghost of Hamlet’s father to solve our Oedipal problems; we no longer need Othello’s jealousy to see our marriages; we no longer need the evil MacBeths to understand politics; and we no longer need the rage of King Lear to come to terms with old age. After Lessing’s famous remarks, Shakespeare was for a long time the German dramatist. That is now over. For some time past the theater now needs Chekhov’s weary, melancholy provincials. We see ourselves passionately reflected in them. And what do we see there?

The new freedom

To begin with, Peter Stein’s two Chekhov productions were, from today’s standpoint, both a high-point and an endpoint. Stein’s Three Sisters (1984) and The Cheery Garden (1995) were the fulfillment of what Stanislavski had begun: historically authentic decor, precise sounding out of every emotional reaction, exact sizing up of relationships, due attention to every allusion. This was also true of Luc Bondy’s Seagull (Vienna, 2001), and essentially true of Peter Zadek’s legendary Cherry Garden (1996), even if they were harsher, more naked and unvarnished than Stein’s classical productions.

Then something happened that no one would have thought possible: the thrill of a new freedom. We have since learned that Chekhov can be reinterpreted and seen as something quite different from melancholy with a samovar. It soon became clear that Chekhov could be performed in a free and timeless manner, as did, for instance, Barbara Frey in her Uncle Vanya (2004) at the Residenztheater in Munich. In the Stuttgart production of Platonov (2006), Karin Henkel and Felix Goeser in the title roles then delivered an unleashed actors’ performance. Goeser proved that Chekhov can be performed wildly, that the actor need not subtlely work himself in his role. He can stride through it like a virtuoso. Chekhov follows.

Stefan Pucher and Chekhov was the big revolution. Since his 1999 Cherry Garden in Basel, his first staging of a classic play, Pucher has wedded the intellectual and emotional world of Pop and DJ culture with Chekhov. His productions are cool; they play with media; songs, microport and video seem here as if made for Chekhov. A Cherry Garden on the forestage, a Seagull (2000) as an attack on the audience. Gigantic video images of people locked in intimate moments.

Beautiful souls

Luk Perceval does the hardest Chekhov. His Platonov (2006) in Berlin seemed almost to stand still and to lose itself in the vast space of the Schaubühne before it broke loose. His Cherry Garden (2001) was intensified to the point of chaos. Andres Kriegenburg showed, with his Three Sisters (2006), that Chekhov can still be performed quite poetically and elegiacally without turning into kitsch. Everybody is afraid of that. Kriegenburg’s Chekhov convinces us by its images: sad, colossal masks, a great deal of beige fabric, its own fantastic realm.

The old masters provided the high-points. Dimiter Gotscheff presented a very naked, raw Ivanov (2005), alone in the great round of the Berlin Volksbühne, alone in the fog. And in his Uncle Vanya (2008), Jürgen Gosch staged something like his theatrical legacy. Not even Peter Stein has come so close to Chekhov, and yet Gosch works completely independently in his naked world. Theater without effects and yet very magical, very tragic and very human.

Beneath the various points of view, something remains the same for all the directors and actors. They love Chekhov; they love him because his characters seem to have a soul and because these souls have a unique beauty, even in their baseness. These souls love to philosophize, to reflect on everything under the sun. They don’t suppose, however, that this is of any special importance. The world is where they are, but they don’t take themselves very seriously. They are all unhappy. Happiness is a very, very rare good. But they go on living. Chekhov should be underplayed; every exaggeration should be eliminated; the theater should become more and more simple, bare, naked.