ABSTRACT
There are occasions when ‘the play's the thing,’ and occasions when the actors represent the main interest of an evening's entertainment. Alas, there are also occasions when neither play nor actors seem to justify themselves or to mean anything significant or noteworthy. We are much afraid that the audience in the Little Theatre last night went away with a very confused sense of what the play was about, or what the actors were trying to convey either to one another or to ‘their friends in front.’ Assuredly it was not the fault of the author, albeit that some of the lighter spirits may have thought that Anton Chekhov was a much over-rated man. Chekhov is a delicate and graceful artist, the vehicle of whose expression is not familiar to us, and therefore possibly a little difficult to understand. Even in Russia he was not understood at first, for it is notorious that the very drama, ‘The Seagull,’ presented lat night, was a complete failure in St. Petersburg. The critics said that Chekhov's characters acted like madmen - the very criticism, perhaps, which sprang to the lips of some of the spectators last night. But when it was produced at Moscow it was a brilliant success - so fine is the line which in the case of some artistic work divides victory from failure. As enacted in the Little Theatre ‘The Seagull’ failed to make any decisive mark, just as when the same author's play, ‘The Cherry Orchard,’ was done by the Stage Society it, too, failed to capture the sympathies of the house. But then ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is a distinctively Russian play - Russian in spirit and fibre, subtle and very strange and enigmatic to the foreigner. ‘The Seagull’ is very subtle, also, in some of its half-lights and semi-tones of meaning and suggestion. But, like all fine art, it needs a very capable and enlightened interpretation. It requires something more than a general sympathy with work new and unfamiliar. Its whole virtue disappears in the hands of unpractised actors. Doubtless some of those who took part in ‘The Seagull’ were earnest and even enthusiastic. But there were just two artists in the performance - Miss Gertrude Kingston and Madame Lydia Yavorska. The rest is - silence.
