Happy Birthday Michael Chekhov
The Russian actor, director and theorist of performance Michael Chekhov was born 131 years ago today. This blog is based on the entry I wrote for him in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Theatre Directors (edited by Maria M. Delgado and Simon Williams).
Michael Chekhov in Hitchcock’s film Spellbound.
Michael Chekhov was born in 1891. Now widely remembered as an actor and theorist of actor training, he was also a significant director. In 1924, Chekhov became director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre, where he began to develop his own technique of acting and directing, most notably through a production of Hamlet (1924), which he both conceived and starred in. The basis of Chekhov’s ideas in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy led to his being threatened by a state campaign against exponents of religious ideology and leaving Russia in 1928.
Chekhov continued his quest to reinvent theatrical artistry as an émigré for the next quarter of a century in Berlin, Paris, Latvia, Lithuania, Dartington Hall (Devon), New York, and Hollywood. Though he did sometimes direct individual productions such as a well-received Twelfth Night for the Habima Theatre (1930), Chekhov’s principal goal was always to establish a studio with a permanent ensemble. He did so most successfully when his Dartington-based Chekhov Theatre Studio moved to America, creating touring productions and two Broadway runs. The first was an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (Lyceum Theatre, 1939), which was not well received, and the second Twelfth Night (Little Theatre, 1941), a much more successful production, praised by the critic Stark Young for its ‘ensemble playing’. When the Studio was forced to close in 1942, Chekhov moved to Hollywood, where he directed his final production, The Government Inspector (1946), and worked as an actor and teacher of acting until his death in 1955. It is notable that, although he repeatedly returned to Hamlet and King Lear in his teaching and writing, Chekhov achieved greater public success, as both an actor and director, with comedy.
Never a confident linguist, Chekhov did not develop his directorial repertoire after his departure from Russia; it remained centred on the plays he had learned as a young actor under Stanislavsky and his close friend and collaborator Evgeny Vakhtangov. His visual aesthetic also remained fundamentally shaped by the symbolism and expressionism of his youth and by Vakhtangov’s ‘fantastic realism’. Chekhov’s significance as a director, then, is not primarily rooted in his productions, but in the techniques he developed for their creation by a collaborating ensemble of artists. In this respect, his ideas were notably ahead of their time, anticipating dramaturgical experiments with collaborative writing and collective creation that he did not live to see.
