Jangled Soul-Music

Ivanov. Chekhov's anti-heroes lead lives of tragic farce. Where the Marx Brothers once chopped up a train (in Go West) and fueled the engine with the kindling in order to keep going, Chekhov's pinched landowners would rather die than chop down their forests. They have champagne tastes--intellectually and spiritually--on vodka incomes. Their hearts are even emptier than their purses. The title character of Chekhov's first full-length play, a man in paralytic despair, candidly performs a self-autopsy: "I haven't the heart to believe in anything. I hope for nothing, care for no one. I only dread the thought of waking up every morning."

Morning brings him a chirping plague of creditors, the numbing guilt of not loving a wife (Vivien Leigh) who is dying of tuberculosis, and the intrusive ardor of a romantic girl who is pursuing her own phantom of love. Around Ivanov, vivid, vulgar, irascibly self-absorbed neurotics drown boredom in vodka and talk, the opiate of the Russian gentry. Ivanov punctuates their endless sentences with a bullet in his brain.

Chekhov had a gift for giving life to the life-sick which is somehow lacking in John Gielgud's curiously inanimate performance. The pukka sahib accents of the cast conjure up stiff-lipped Britons muddling through, rather than Russians sucked under in emotional quicksands. Chekhov's night music of the soul, so beautifully attuned in Director William Ball's 1958 off-Broadway revival, is jangled here. At its purest, it is an ineffable resonance of laughter and tears, making the whole world kin. It is unthinkable that anyone who loves Chekhov would miss the Gielgud production, and equally unthinkable not to regret what is missing in it.

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