Ivanov

Chekhov's signature is the pistol shot, the report of suicide just before the final curtain. But most modern productions of Chekhov ignore the pistol shot, treating it as a melodramatic fillip tagged on to two and a half hours of detached psychological observation. Sir John Gielgud's production of Ivanov, however, takes the gun shot seriously. His choice of play, his acting in the title role, and his direction, all present a more involved and perhaps truer Chekhov than is currently fashionable.

The conventional approach to Chekhov emphasizes detachment and the fine etching of character. The proscenium arch is mandatory, the sets are deep, the action well separated from the audience. The long, pregnant pause is preferred to the passionate cry. This approach plays up the interaction of secondary "characters" for poignancy and comic effect, and plays down the potential melodrama of violent love, suicide and duels. Jonathan Black's staging of The Seagull at the Loeb last season was a fine production within this convention.

This approach has two basic flaws-it makes Chekhov a more callous observer than he actually is, and it weakens the motivation for the play's climactic violence. It is a particularly misguided way to stage Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play. There are strong traces of Chekhov himself in the main character, a disillusioned intellectual whose model estate is hopelessly in the red, whose zealotry has dwindled to cynicism. Ivanov cannot merely be observed, he must be felt.

Ivanov is also a man driven to suicide, and suicide is inexplicable without desperation and savagery. An excess of underplaying, or more charitably, a style of ironic detachment, cannot explain a man's putting a bullet through his head.

Gielgud is convincing. His Ivanov is always on the verge of cruelty to himself, and to others. In the opening scene he nervously admits to his dying wife's doctor (played in an appropriately intolerable, stiffly self-righteous fashion by John Merivale) that as she approaches death from TB he loves her less, that her illness is simply getting on his nerves. He knows the doctor must think him a monster but, he says, rubbing his hands in agitation, and raising his voice in irritation, he just can't help it.

After tripping backward into a love triangle, Ivanov, queasy with guilt, lashes out directly at his wife (a convert from Judaism played by Vivien Leigh). Gielgud's fingers claw at the nonexistent handle of a desk drawer, his eyes hesitate. His voice pauses for an instant and then spills out the word, "Jewess!" Finally, he tells her the doctor thinks she will die very soon, and his flaring agitation dies down to remorse.

In short, Gielgud is never afraid to play Ivanov to the hilt. He fully, uses his absolute mastery of technique -- spewing lines at fantastic speed which still remain intelligible, of keeping his hands in constant motion. Just before his death, within the space of 90 seconds Ivanov goes through three distinct phases--black laughter, broken despair, and suicidal resolve. This is theatricality in the grand manner, and Gielgud carries it off. His Ivanov has the desperation and the savagery, and his suicide is not only believable, it is inevitable.

Gielgud, the director, hews more closely to the conventional line. The detachment is here more appropriate since it is Ivanov's detachment from the other characters, not merely the audience's detachment from the play. Gielgud orchestrates for a marvelous band of Chekhovian eccentrics-Dillon Evans as a monomaniacal bridge player, Ethel Griffies as a sour-faced marriage broker, Ronald Radd in a somewhat deeper role as the manager of Ivanov's estate, a man whose visions of wealth are only equalled by his incompetence.

The whole crew assembles in the first act for the archetypal boring, Chekhovian party. Thirteen characters saunter about, titter, and listen through their earhorns to the tittering of others. At the fall of the first-act curtain this same group swarms in with sparklers, pouring around the shocked Vivien Leigh who is staring at Sasha (Jennifer Hilary), the neighbor's daughter, in Ivanov's arms. Gielgud jars the audience, giving them perhaps two seconds to take in the entire scene.

Rouben Ter-Arutunian's settings help immensely in Gielgud's staging of group scenes. The first-act outdoor set uses the depth of the Shubert stage with four planes of trees, but keeps the acting area forward and close to the audience, opening the stage more than is the custom in the conventional Chekhov.

Two elements of Gielgud's Ivanov interfere with the general tone of the production--the two younger women and the problem of Ivanov's age. Miss Leigh and Miss Hilary try hard in extremely vapid roles. Chekhov was always weak at creating women who were neither old nor eccentric, and at this early stage of his career he was terrible. Miss Leigh might have played Ivanov's genteel, tubercular wife as a little more ill and a little less sweet, but simply coughing louder could not have added depth to a structurally shallow role. Miss Hilary is given two types of lines-one shows that Sasha is strong-willed and the other that she is tender. Miss Hilary plays the girl as strong-willed and tender. Chekhov makes it very difficult to pay attention to either of them.

The age problem is also an inherent one, inherent in the 62-year old Gielgud. Ivanov is supposed to be 35 at the time of his suicide. The surrender of youth to failure is part of his tragedy. Gielgud adds ten years to Ivanov and unavoidably softens the character's desperation. The confession of a man of 45 that he is turning gray is not poignant, but standard.

Whether as a result of Ivanov's age increase or not, one other key character is also played as too old. Count Shabelsky (Edward Atienza) is the 62-year-old uncle of Ivanov. Atienza plays him as a spry-minded, physically crumbling comedy figure. He gives up one attempt at seduction by falling exhausted into an armchair, resolving that dying would probably be a good thing as it required little energy. But by playing Shabelsky as a dodderer, Atienza lessens his dramatic impact. In Act III, when he is suddenly reminded of the duets he once played with Ivanov's now dead wife, his burst of tears comes across more as the product of senility than of grief. Only when he speaks in a calmer voice of his own dead wife is his protrayal of grief real.

Gielgud is already safely ensconced in the Olympus of English-speaking actors and it is a tribute to his talent that he continues to try new approaches. A director of his skill and standing was needed to infuse a new passion into Chekhov and restore the pistol shot to the core of Chekhov's art.