Are You There Crocodile? Inventing Anton Chekhov
Saturday
March 8, 2003
The Guardian
His master's voice
Simon
Callow finds Michael Pennington's commitment to Chekhov's work exemplary in Are
You There, Crocodile?
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Not so long ago,
in one of those preposterous polls to which newspapers are so curiously
addicted, The Cherry Orchard was found to be the greatest play ever written.
Leading directors throughout the world had been canvassed, and this was the
conclusion.
However dubious
the psephology, the poll expressed a general truth: the plays of Anton Chekhov
hold a place in the affections of actors and directors like no other. Until
fairly recently, this enthusiasm was not shared by the general public. The
plays were thought to be box-office poison, and it was only at the insistence
of performers and directors that they maintained a place in the repertory.
Nowadays, Chekhov
is a universal favourite and even in an indifferent production - and there are many
of these - few audiences fail to take away the impression that, in revealing
the small provincial lives of his characters, the author has somehow conveyed
the core of what it is to be human. His painstakingly observed people -
failures, most of them, of one sort or another - are effortlessly archetypal,
and the experience of watching them is one of profound recognition. Sonya,
Vershinin, Tusenbach, Firs - they are like family; we actors know them all
intimately.
The fact that they
provide wonderful parts would itself be enough to endear them to actors; but,
in addition, the world in which they live is curiously parallel to that of
actors - sitting around waiting for things to happen, dreaming of the place
(the West End, Hollywood) where everything is better, fitfully possessed by the
compulsion to work, having short-lived affairs simply in order to stave off the
gnawing sense of futility. Actors, like the doctors in Chekhov, are often
consumed by a sense of having betrayed their own calling, of having disappointed
themselves and God; the dachas in which so many of the plays take place are
like so many green rooms.
Michael Pennington
has been preoccupied by Chekhov's work since he was loftily told as a Cambridge
undergraduate that he would not be cast in any of the plays: he was better
suited to the English classics. Eventually he proved the student wiseacres
wrong, appearing in various Chekhovian roles with some success. But his
fascination went beyond the plays to the man himself, until finally he began to
form a strangely personal relationship with the author. This burgeoned into a
very fruitful "obsession" (Pennington's inverted commas), which
produced his one-man play Anton Chekhov, his radio play Chekhov in Siberia and,
by no means least, the present volume, a work of some originality.
At the simplest
level, it is an account of the genesis, gestation and subsequent life of his
acclaimed one-man play (which he recently revived at the National Theatre, and
the text of which is included in Are You There, Crocodile?). In approaching
Chekhov with a view to presenting him on stage, he comes at him from an unusual
angle, sifting through the work and the life with a prospector's eye, seizing
on tiny glinting incidents in each which he will assemble to convey both the
essence of the man and his complexity.
The idea of doing
a one-man play was put to him on the Trans-Siberian Express (where else?) by
the American poet and Zen Buddhist, Lucien Stryk (who else?). At first he
resisted the notion, but as his enchantment with all things Russian began to
crystallise into a specific passion for Chekhov, he finally gave in to the
inevitability of creating a show.
Pennington, being
Pennington - fastidious, a little cerebral, deeply self-challenging - set
himself the limitation of referring as little as possible to the plays or to
Chekhov's relationship with the theatre. He read more and more deeply into the
short stories and eventually discovered for himself that severe and little-read
masterpiece "The Island of Sahkalin", a report on the God-forsaken
penal colony in Siberia. Though on the surface it is Chekhov's most objective
work, it turns out to be highly revealing of him. As Pennington takes us
through his discoveries with characteristic patience and subtlety, we begin to
peer deeply into Chekhov's mind.
What Pennington is
doing is to befriend him across the century since he died. The actor has an
uncommon gift for friendship; it is something he takes very seriously, and we
become party to his tender, quizzical acquisition of knowledge about this
important new figure in his life, who happens to be dead. He is not blind to
Chekhov's faults - his artistic ruthlessness ("criminality,"
Pennington calls it), his occasional evasions, his odd coldness - but he must
know everything about someone he calls "perhaps my favourite man".
The book has no
photographs: instead, in a remarkable section, Pennington describes the
successive images of Chekhov from boyhood to shortly before his early demise,
and his scrutiny is that of a lover, or a detective. He trudges around in his
subject's footsteps, drinks in his cafes, sits at his desk.
This is all grist
to the actor's mill, of course, but there is something more at work here, an
intellectual itch that marks Pennington out from his fellow thespians. Here, as
in his preparations for Strider, the play adapted from Tolstoy in which he
played a horse, he reveals a rather unEnglish fanaticism, a huge seriousness,
touched with a soupçon of narcissism, even perhaps a slight element of masochism.
He is an unusual beast in the theatre zoo.
As the one-man
play becomes a reality, the second strand of this book becomes increasingly
significant: the actor's hopes and dreams for his work in the theatre. He is a
great idealist; indeed, he was a co-founder of the English Stage Company and
has devoted his life to it as actor, director and producer. He will, it seems,
go anywhere or work with anyone who will push him further. His account of
working with that wily provocateur, the Russian director Yuri Lyubimov, is a
classic description of theatre work at its most visionary, though he clearly
sees the paradoxes of the man: "detesting totalitarianism, he was himself
a tsar".
And he has a
healthy appreciation of his own work. Of his performance in Strider, he says:
"I suppose modesty about the result is becoming, but I don't really see
why. If ever I wanted to be remembered for a piece of work, this was the
one." In a world in which actors are supposed simply to shut up about
their work, this attitude (as well as others revealed throughout the book) is
refreshing and fitting.
He has no interest
in mere virtuosity. "The solo performer has to do something beyond the
reach of the best-written biography." He slowly evolves his script,
developing and trimming it after opening at the National. He still has more to
find. As he trawls wider and digs deeper, he continues to take us through
Chekhov's work, including exceptionally lucid accounts of all the major plays.
But this is no catalogue: it is, for example, the death of his father, just
before the first preview performance of the show, that leads him to his
discussion of The Three Sisters, which he shows to be haunted by the figure of
the sisters' dead father. Similarly, the death of his mother leads on to Chekhov's
mother, both of them equally vividly summoned up.
This is the third
strand of the book: Pennington's own journey through life. Like his hero, he is
dry, almost laconic, about his personal progress. It is his fascination with
what he sees around him which gives us the man, again like Chekhov, who seems
to sit on his shoulder. Pennington's literary gifts have been evident since his
first book, Rossya, the riveting narrative of his 1975 journey to Siberia, and
he writes here with great precision and vividness (he describes a Moscow
journalist: "I last see her downing four champagnes as if they were an
investment").
He
recounts Chekhov's death in Badenweiller with faultless economy - the summoning
of the doctor, Chekhov's delivery of his own diagnosis, the last sips of
champagne, the quiet extinction of life, the large black moth which suddenly
flies into the room - and quotes, as virtually the last words of the book, the
words that explain the passionate esteem which Pennington and all of us feel
for the great man: "Most of all, dear friend, it's impossible to lie in
art. You lie in love, in politics, even in medicine; you can deceive other
people and even the Good Lord himself, but it is impossible to lie in
art."