Brian Friel and Anton Chekhov – Masters of the Light Touch

Ireland’s greatest living dramatist, Brian Friel, has long been fascinated by Russian writers, and by the work of Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904) in particular. Way back in 1963 he observed Tyrone Guthrie directing Chekhov’s Three Sisters at his theatre in Minneapolis. In 1981, Friel’s first translated play was Chekhov’s Three Sisters, for the Derry-based Field Day Theatre Company he had co-founded. He returned to Chekhov in 1998 with his translation of Uncle Vanya. In 2001, Friel wrote adaptations of Chekhov’s short story Lady with a Lapdog, which Friel titled The Yalta Game, and the little Chekhov farce, The Bear. Afterplay premiered in London in 2003. In addition, he wrote an Irish version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1992) and toyed with the idea of translating Gorky, Gogol and Ostrovsky.

The similarities between Friel – sometimes called ‘The Irish Chekhov’ – and the Russian writer have often been commented upon. The two dramatists do have much in common. Both Friel and Chekhov are noted short story writers as well as playwrights. Both create a sense of old worlds dissolving while characters are left behind in their own realities. They have often been compared for their finesse in combining humour and tragedy.

Friel himself mused about his affinity to Russian writers: “I am not sure why I find the late-nineteenth-century Russians so sympathetic. Maybe because the characters in the plays behave as if their old certainties were as sustained as ever – even though they know in their hearts that their society is in melt-down and the future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation for them. Maybe a bit like people of my own generation in Ireland today. Or maybe I find those Russians sympathetic because they have no expectations whatever from love but invest everything in it. Or maybe they attract me because they seem to expect that their problems will disappear if they talk about them – endlessly.”

Friel and Chekhov seem, as Harvey O’Brien has noted, “concerned with a world in which memory and reflection are in a state of conscious interplay with immediate reality, where perceptions of the world are tempered by half-realised truths and (often frustrated) visions of the ideal. Both have a mixture of humour and tragedy in which one is often a sublimated version of the other, and both present stories driven less by the urgency of narrative as by a more meditative, deconstructive engagement with the moment's realisation.”

As Richard Pine put it in the programme for Two Plays After, there is a connection between these worlds on the level of national consciousness: “Friel brings ‘Russian’ themes into close proximity with themes which have preoccupied the modern Irish stage: people who live far away from reality; hopes that are more depressing than inspiring; a lifetime’s experience of emptiness, of longing, of deferral; action (the real world) always taking place elsewhere."

The Bear is a relatively straight adaptation of the original, first staged in 1888. Chekhov had dashed the farce off early in his writing career "to while away the time"; it proved so popular in his day that it became a mainstay of his income ever after, one of which he was privately a little ashamed. It is a youthfully brash satire in which we are invited to feel superior to the characters, particularly the protagonists, whose wrestling with their deep-seated anger towards and distrust of the opposite sex pushes them to ridiculous extremes.

The story takes place in the home of an affluent Russian widow, Elena Popova, who has been mourning the death of her promiscuous husband for a year. Her aged servant Luka urges her to give up her secluded life, but Elena insists that she will remain faithful to her husband even if he never did to her. Then her home is invaded by a boorish creditor, the misogynist lieutenant Gregory Smirvnov, who demands that Elena pay him money her husband owed him or he will go bankrupt – and will not leave until she does so. Sparks fly between them leading, inevitably, to farcical, satiric romance.

Though easily dismissed as vacuous fluff (as it often was by Chekhov himself), this is a neatly mounted story of characters trapped in a cycle of irrational self-destruction. Fluff it may be, but it shows that in addition to “moral temper and concern” both writers, as Elmer Andrews put it, “have the saving grace of humour, the consummate light touch.”

Friel’s version of The Bear was first produced at the Gate Theatre in Dublin on 5 March 2002. Alastair Macaulay of the Financial Times found it “superbly funny, vivid, keenly alert to Chekhov's modern sensitivities to gender issues…”