Contemporary Arts
Muted Tragedy
THE SEAGULL. By Anton Chekhov. (Saville.) --CESAR AND CLEOPATRA. By Bernard SHAW. (Old Vie).
WHENEVER a play by Chekhov is put on there always seems to be a great deal of discussion as to whether it is a comedy or a tragedy, as to what precisely it means or meant to the Russian audience to which it is native. Person- ally, I doubt whether these discussions have more than an academic interest. The Seagull, if it is a comedy, is a real comedy—that is, a real tragedy—and the last act certainly is one of the most painful to watch that I know. The play has a rather more definite plot than most of Chekhov's work. It is the old story of the girl betrayed, a story susceptible of melodrama, but, just for that reason, seeing it, one realises more clearly than in most of these great plays how entirely different Chekhov's handling of his theme is, from that of other playwrights. The rather banal story is lifted on to another level by the play of symbolism and the dialec- tic of small-talk. No purer or more muted tragedy exists than the last interview of Nina. betrayed and wandering in her mind, with Konstantin, her first lover. The gentle quality of the tragedy comes, I think, from the fact that even villainy in Chekhov is msthetic. Trigorin is surely a villain, but he is an agree- able one, whose weakness is never as odious as it would be portrayed by a less sympathetic hand. Chekhov was a doctor and he seems to view his characters from a medical point of view. He cannot save them, but he can do something towards-curing them.
It was a great pleasure to see The Seagull presented for the first time for God knows how many years on the London stage. Diana Wyn- yard did especially well as the egocentric actress, IrMa Arkadina, and Perlita Neilson was touching as Nina, though perhaps not quite stupid enough. John Clements was, in- deed, lucky in his actors, who, on the male side, included George Relph, Nicholas Hannen and Hugh Williams as the foppish Trigorin, whom he succeeded in making pathetic as well as repulsive. This was a good repertory pro- duction, and the only criticism I have to make of it is that Mr. Clements's direction empha- sises the eccentricity rather than the.poetry of Chekhov's drama. I should have preferred a quieter production, but for that a smaller theatre than the Saville would have been needed. As it is, anyone who is fond of the theatre should not miss this chance of seeing one of the greatest plays of tiv twentieth century.
At the Old Vic the Birmingham repertory company has been doing Ccesar and Cleopatra adequately, but without inspiration. In this tribute by Shaw to the fibermensch Geoffrey Bayldon is a commanding Cmsar and Doreen Aris gives Cleopatra all the savagery of Saint Trinian's—whose headmistress Nancie Jack- son's Ftatateeta might well be. Everybody, especially Douglas Seale as the director, worked rather hard, but hardly succeeded in disguising the thinness of much of the play— especially the opening monologue of the god Ra, which I for one found quite intolerably boring in its content and embarrassingly arch
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