Friel vs. Chekhov
Brian Friel has never been a master of the well-placed non sequitur. Characters in his plays pretty much say what they mean, and whatever they say tends to proceed from transparent narrative logic. So, three quarters of the way through the Donmar Warehouse’s Uncle Vanya at BAM, I began to wonder how Friel’s free-wheeling “translation” would handle the Africa map. I’m talking about one of the final scenes in the play in which Astrov, waiting for vodka to be brought to him before he leaves the Voinitskys for good, comments out of nowhere that “It must be unbearably hot in Africa right now.” As written by Chekhov, the line has a beauty in its randomness. As Richard Gilman notes in Chekhov’s Plays, “Africa, remote, unknown, a wholly other life, isn’t a comment but a contrast, a piece of counterpoint.” The line brings a sense of release from the claustrophobia of the previous three acts and it transitions the play into the quiet domesticity with which the play ends. Coupled with Vanya’s retort, “Unbearably,” it becomes poignant once it is clear that these may be the final words ever exchanged between the two friends.
Not famous for subtlety, Friel doesn’t know what to make of the line. Following the pattern he has by this point adhered to for the entire play, Friel makes three or four sentences out of one, then refers to a running joke he has inserted in the play about estate hanger-on Telegin’s awe of all things German, including settlements in Africa. And good-bye to an environment that in any number of Chekhov translations feels unforced and even magical in the way it emerges so imperceptibly.
In his own work, Friel is often described as “Chekhovian,” presumably for his depictions of country folk with unfulfilled yearnings. But a shared interest in subject matter hardly makes two writers a natural pair. In Chekhov’s plays, sufficient fascination is taken in different personalities and how they co-exist as to make vindication of one character over another beside the point. Friel, on the other hand, always wants to nudge our empathies. In adapting Vanya, he can’t resist changing Yelena’s line in which she asks the night watchman to quiet down to something like, “I’m going to play the piano tonight, Yefim, what do you think?” As if a character can’t be likable if she isn’t chummy with the servants. He gives Vanya an applause-inducing jab at the end of his outburst with Serebryakov: “And I am not a nonentity.” As if we had to be told that to believe it or be reminded of what a cretin Vanya’s rival is in order to sympathize with Vanya. And Astrov’s preoccupation with forest conservation isn’t idealistic enough for Friel: we have to hear him pontificate on social policy and make anti-czarist remarks as proof of how dyed-in-the-wool he is.
But if Friel may be thanked for wresting all ambiguity from Chekhov’s text, the forty-five minutes or so of speech he lards on is harder to appreciate. The Donmar production clocks in at three hours with one ten-minute intermission. A typical production of “Vanya” lasts somewhat more than two. The seeming lack of deliberation by which events unfold in a Chekhov play can, in an excellent production, cause all awareness of time to disappear. With a version as freighted as Brian Friel’s, the Donmar’s generally excellent acting and competent direction weren’t distraction enough from my sense in the first act that the people onstage had been talking for an exceptionally long time.