ABSTRACT
. . .Mr. Charles Laughton's Lopahin most certainly excels those of his predecessors - and in most subtle and important respects. What he conveys better than any other actor who has taken the part is Lopahin's muddled inconsistent emotional attitude towards the family whom he supplants. He is the son of a slave, and he never forgets that he has been a peasant, but he also never forgets that Lyubov was to him a goddess wonderfully kind. He adores her still. If it were possible to help her, he would love to save her from herself. Her fecklessness exasperates him, but on the other hand he feels a kind of daunted, almost superstitious, admiration for the sublimely silly indifference of these aristocrats to their fate. But then his triumph! He, the beaten, half-starved peasant boy is now the owner of the estate. Mr. Laughton conveyed this mixture of emotions, and in so doing he succeeded in being more ‘Russian’ than any English actor I have seen in the part. An Englishman, though he might feel this conflict of emotions, would pick out one dominating element in them, probably the one most becoming, and speak and behave accordingly. If he felt triumphant he might from motives of good taste suppress the fact; or he might say to himself, these feckless creatures deserve their fate, when he would certainly not go begging for a little sympathy. But Lopahin is a Russian and, therefore, never thinks about the figure he is cutting, and accepts the inconsistency of his own emotions. He displays them instead of editing them. This was the triumph of Mr. Laughton's art: he was soft and hard, humble and over-bearing, ruthless and sympathetically upset; he was triumphant and yet he felt that somehow it was all wrong. . . .
