William Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts I & II directed by Michael Boyd and Richard Twyman for the Royal Shakespeare Company andplaying in repertory at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until March 16th.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Parts I & II, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater Company, Directed by Barbara Gaines at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the Complete Works Festival, July 6-15, 2006.
Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by Trevor Nunn.
I’m guessing, though based on considerable anecdotal evidence, that Chekhov is the second most produced playwright in the world and also the second most highly esteemed. He has certainly aged better than his Anglophone contemporaries, Shaw and Galsworthy and is ahead by a less clear margin of Ibsen. Purely subjectively – and therefore less speculatively – he certainly occupies second place in my own theatrical memories. Any half-decent production of Chekhov’s rather limited opus seems to create a powerful atmosphere.
Yet he is in many ways the opposite of Shakespeare whose world is infinitely varied and extensive. With Chekhov we are always in the strangely narrow vastness of nineteenth century Russia, modernising and liberalising, but not quite. We are always at the meeting point of the aristocracy and the intelligentsia and always somehow both claustrophobic and agoraphobic. Whereas half the fun of Shakespeare, particularly the comedies, is that you can experiment with different contexts, which suggest different nuances and emphases, the Chekhov context is rarely changed (like verismo opera), though Brian Friel has adapted some Chekhov – and more Turgenev – to an Anglo-Irish world.
