ABSTRACT
In the course of ‘The Cherry Orchard’ one of the characters says to Gaev, an elderly man, ‘You ought to hold your tongue. Say nothing; that's all that's wanted’; and another adds, ‘If only you would hold your tongue, you'd be so much happier.’ And yet this is exactly what people in a Chekhov play cannot do. They cannot hold their tongues. . . . We are as near intimacy with human impulsiveness in the plays of Chekhov as we are ever likely to be, for the reason that in England people rarely open their hearts. As a result there are many strangers in England, and we are often led into sentimentality in the effort to guess behind the spoken word what we conceive to be the hidden message of the heart. We are betrayed because we give to others a subtlety and sensitiveness which we ourselves only reach after. This produces such a yearning towards the finer workings of emotion that our real knowledge is lost in a series of unwarrantable sophistications. From such a process is derived the Anglo-American psychological novel and the psychological play. From it, also, comes the horrifying solemnity of all productions of Chekhov in this country. In the portentous gloom of these productions we are to infer out of vacuum the inner tragedy of the Chekhovian type. Our producers are bent upon emphasising a fundamental philosophy which is not to be found in the plays, and so our actors are made to find significance in their silences rather than in their speeches.
