7 August: Uncle Vanya by Chekov

 

Following on from last month, in August we will again be re-reading a play.

Uncle Vanya 

Chekov

Another 2016 masterpiece!  I could not resist this, having recently seen Andrew Scott's brilliant one man production.

 

Here's what I wrote in 2016.

 

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

It was first published in 1897 and received its Moscow première in 1899.

The play portrays the visit of an elderly professor and his glamorous, much younger second wife, Yeléna, to the rural estate that supports their urban lifestyle - an estate from which they receive but take no part in maintaining. 

Two friends, Vanya, brother of the Professor's late first wife, who has long managed the estate, and Astrov, the local Doctor, both fall under Yelena's spell, while bemoaning the ennui of their provincial existence. 

Sonya, the Professor's daughter by his first wife, who has worked with Vanya to keep the estate going, meanwhile suffers from the awareness of her own lack of beauty and from her unrequited feelings for Dr. Astrov. Matters are brought to a crisis when the Professor announces his intention to sell the estate: Vanya and Sonya's home and raison d'être, with a view to investing the proceeds to achieve a higher income for himself and his wife.

The version we will be reading however is an adaptation by Brian Friel,  who has been described as 'Ireland's greatest playwright' and an 'Irish Chekhov'.  You may find the occasional word or expression that is unfamiliar - and it is possible that I will not be able to translate for you!  

Characters

• Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov – a retired university professor, who has lived for years in the city on the earnings of his late first wife's rural estate, managed for him by Vanya and Sonya.
• Helena Andreyevna Serebryakov (Yelena) – Professor Serebryakov's young and beautiful second wife. She is 27 years old.
• Sofia Alexandrovna Serebryakov (Sonya) – Professor Serebryakov's daughter from his first marriage. She is of a marriageable age but is considered plain.
• Maria Vasilyevna Voynitsky  – the widow of a privy councilor and mother of Vanya (and of Vanya's late sister, the Professor's first wife).
• Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky ("Uncle Vanya") – Maria's son and Sonya's uncle, the title character of the play. He is 47 years old.
• Mikhail Lvovich Astrov – a middle aged country doctor.
• Ilya Ilych Telegin (nicknamed "Waffles" for his pockmarked skin) – an impoverished landowner, who now lives on the estate as a dependent of the family.
• Marina Timofeevna – an old nurse.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Cheknov is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. 

Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."^[7]

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays,Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text".

Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story.^[10] He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

 Brian Friel (1929-2015)

Brian Friel was considered to be one of the greatest living English-language dramatists, and referred to as an "Irish Chekhov" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland".

Recognised for early works, Friel had 24 plays published in a more than half-century spanning career that culminated in his election to the position of Saoi of Aosdána (Head of the Irish Arts Foundation). His plays were commonly featured on Broadway and won many awards. 

 

26 June (July Reading): The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard

 

For personal reasons we'll be doing repeat readings in July and August.  Several suggestions were made, and this month we will be reading:

 

 

The Hard Problem

Tom Stoppard.

Read in 2016 which was a particularly fine year for the group and we read some brilliant plays - this being one of them!

 

Here's what I wrote in 2016:

 

The much-anticipated The Hard Problem has received somewhat mixed reviews.  I am always nervous when approaching a work by Stoppard as he is so very very clever and intellectual that watching one of his plays can be quite taxing and not an easy night out.  But I found this play not only strangely accessible but also in some respects a disappointment: I don't want to give away the ending, but for me it was too neat.  Here are some extracts from reviews.

From The Telegraph:

Sir Tom Stoppard’s new play, his first in nine years, is called The Hard Problem – a reference to the difficulty scientists and philosophers have in fathoming the nature of human consciousness. Watching it has left me with a hard problem of my own. I want to salute Stoppard, now 77 and one of our finest living playwrights ... But there’s no getting round it: this is a major disappointment.

From The Observer:

The “hard problem” of the title is the problem of consciousness. Where is it? What is it? Crucially, is “the mind” the same as “the brain”? The joy of the play, his first for nine years, is that it brings this problem to the stage and poses it crisply. The difficulty is that Stoppard then glides away from examining it. Often taxed with being too intellectual as a playwright, he is here not intellectually stringent enough. The great adventurer looks strangely conventional. 

From The Guardian:

A rich, ideas-packed work that offers a defence of goodness whatever its ultimate source... Stoppard’s play may not solve the hard problem of human consciousness. But it offers endless stimulation and represents, like so much of his work, a search for absolute values and a belief in the possibility of selfless virtue.

The Hard Problem

Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?

This is 'the hard problem' which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry.

Is the day coming when the computer and the MRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

 

Sir Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard was born in July 1937 in Czechoslovakia.  He fled from the Nazis as a child refugee to Singapore with his parents and brother. When that became a difficult place to be his father sent his family to Australia and, as a doctor, remained where he felt he was needed, but he died 4 years later.  In 1946 his family moved to the UK, via time in India,  and after studying there Stoppard became a journalist and, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's mother died in 1996. The family had not talked about their history and neither brother knew what had happened to the family left behind in Czechoslovakia^. In the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, Stoppard found out that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Auschwitz and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters.  He has expressed grief both for a lost father and a missing past, but he has no sense of being a survivor, at whatever remove. "I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life."

He is a prolific writer whose works include many well-known plays and films - including Shakespeare in Love - and he has received many awards.  

His themes are always intellectual and his works include discussions on human rights; censorship; political freedom; linguistics and philosophy.