Guest Blog: Lucy Bailey on Chekhov in a studio space

Here she tells us about
her production of Uncle
Vanya, which stars Iain Glen and Charlotte Emmerson and has this week returned to the The Print Room following a
run in the spring. It plays until 7 July.

My only experience of
Chekhov’s plays had been watching them from a great distance. One
of the finest was Peter Stein’s Cherry Orchard
with an Italian cast in a proscenium theatre in Edinburgh. Stein
created an intensely realistic and detailed soundscape to evoke each
location, which the actors inhabited with an effortless sense of
naturalism, totally unselfconscious, whilst communicating an intimate
knowledge of each other, despite their distance from the audience.
Stein seemed to be following in the footsteps of Constantin
Stanislavski, Chekhov’s contemporary, who directed most of his
plays for the Moscow Arts Theatre and brought his own theories of
naturalism to bear on all his productions.

The combined aura of
Stein, Stanislavsky and Chekhov has instilled in me a kind of holy
reverence that you feel when you visit certain monuments, or museums.
The Italian language added a further layer of mystification, and the
result has been to keep me away from Chekhov for the first 20 years
of my directing life. Whenever I thought of his work it seemed
immersed in a kind of mysterious haze, as if only the initiated could
unravel the meaning and so bring his plays to life.

Now that has changed.

By good fortune, the
translator Mike Poulton, the actors Iain Glen and Charlotte
Emmerson and I, decided to work together. Mike had written new
versions of Three Sisters and Uncle
Vanya. They were both remarkable for their refreshing
immediacy, depth and wit. We chose Uncle Vanya as
the more interesting option, with Iain and Charlotte deliberately
playing against type, as Vanya and Sonya.

Performing the play at The
Print Room especially appealed to Iain, who found the intimacy of the
space and the vivid presence of the actor very inspiring. Iain
understood how exciting it could be to play such a psychologically
complex character in a space where the audience can read every
flicker of expression. For someone who prepares his roles so
intensely, with minute attention to detail, he realised that none of
his work would be wasted, and the subtlest of shifts within his
character’s mind would be registered by the audience.

In the early stages of
rehearsal I struggled with my own confidence as to how to approach
Chekhov. I very quickly realised that there was in fact no mystery,
and everything I had previously built up about him and his plays was
a smoke screen and distraction. Uncle Vanya, I
realised, was a painfully funny portrait of frustrated lives and
loves, essentially a family drama, which in The Print Room could be
approached with total honesty and simplicity. Given such a good
script the most obvious thing was to trust in it.

Chekhov resonates in a
newfound way in a domestic space. His plays are about people and not
historic events. His canvas is the home and the garden where his
characters try to pursue happiness. His narratives are confined to
his characters’ attempts to achieve a better life despite the lack of
choice. The human scale of a room is the perfect space to experience
the deep humanity which Chekhov brings to his characters. The
designer Bill Dudley and I decided to play the piece as if we were
all in the same space – with no divide between audience and actor.

Sitting in the same room,
the audience feels the same size as the actor. On all four sides they
access the story from four different perspectives. There is no one
privileged viewpoint. The character’s reality is our reality. I
know that the cast felt as if they were under a magnifying glass and
what appeared to the audience as exciting in terms of intimacy and
closeness was exhilarating, but also terrifying. They must have at
times longed for a mysterious haze to descend and the audience to
recede to a safe distance! However I am happy to say that my first
experience of directing Chekhov was so blessed by the human scale of
the space.