Poet of Bruised Hearts

Pirandello used to ponder the curious fate of the great playwright who, being mortal, changed and died, but whose characters were immutable and immortal. Witnessing great drama means spending an evening with these immortals. The Three Sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, who yearn in vain to go to Moscow, have a place in the minds and hearts of people who have never even seen the Chekhov play.

In the second offering of its premiere engagement in Los Angeles, the British National Theater performs with its usual eclat while somewhat scanting the poetic mood music of the play. Chekhov is not wholly Chekhovian without a certain hauntingly sad fragility, like a Chopin nocturne heard by moonlight. In the manner of his closest U.S. counterpart, Tennessee Williams, Chekhov is a poet of bruised hearts and defeated hopes, a laureate of losers.

The director of this current revival, Sir Laurence Olivier, is not temperamentally equipped to stress the sense of loss. With a brisk, nononsense, let's-get-on-with-it approach, he sounds all the optimistic notes in The Three Sisters. The emphasis is on Chekhov's hopes that work and intelligence and energy will change and save the pre-Revolutionary Russia of sloth, injustice and decay. There is something ironic about

Chekhov's evangelistic fervor for the value of work, since his characters would not have been a tenth as fascinating if one actually saw them working. It is almost axiomatic that in the finest plays no one works. Great drama consists mostly of people fighting, hating, making love (licit and illicit), living in a family, being frightened, being bored, reminiscing about the past, wallowing in self-pity, making jokes, mourning, drinking, talking and dying. Because it contains almost all of these things, the protean stuff of life, The Three Sisters is eternally compelling theater.

Despite its superb ensemble work, the British National company has been unable to conceal during this Los Angeles run that it has one actress on its roster with the special authority of a star, Maggie Smith. As Masha, flinging herself into the brief, doomed adulterous affair with Colonel Vershinin (Robert Stephens), she is the incandescent epitome of all women in love. Here is a Hedda Gabler of a Russian provincial town, a woman of fire, intelligence, gravity and spirit, married to a bureaucratic paper clip of a man who bores her to headaches rather than tears. Impelled to passion with a man who must leave her, she conveys a heartrending gallantry. Perhaps the saddest fate of a great playwright is not to live to see performances like this.

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