It cannot merely be a coincidence that Chekhov’s first play, the unpublished during his lifetime ‘Platinov’ that the drapes are a simple off-white cotton affair. “Chekhov was not yet ready to fully embrace the potentiality of substantial drapes in a dramatic production,“*1 stated Professor Catherine Klinger, a Lecturer in Russian Literature at Harvard, when she appeared on Newsnight Review in 1997. “In many ways he was frightened by drapes having been forgotten about during a game of hide and seek in his youth. He was stood behind a pair of drapes in his parent’s living room in their family home in Taganrog, for seven hours before a cousin accidentally found him whilst seeking an aviary.
When Rex Harrison played the title role in the 1971 BBC ‘Play of the Month’ adaptation, critics felt that his lack of acknowledgement of the drapes totally undermined the integrity of the performance. For example, Melvin Bragg (in an article in ‘The Times’) described it as “despite the drapes being prominently displayed throughout the live filming, Harrison barely interacts with them, and instead spent his entire time futilely concentrating on his relationship with Anna, Sophia et al.“*2
It can be argued that it wasn’t until Sir Ian McKellen (pre-knighthood) took on Platinov in Michael Frayn’s ‘Wild Honey’ version of the play that any actor fully realised the true significance of the drapes. McKellen embraced them, challenged them, became them, and in doing so rightly earned himself acclaim and an Olivier Award.
The full five-hour version is rarely performed, as such drapes have been known to combust when exposed to over three hours of stage-lighting and audience indifference.
When ‘Ivanov’ was first performed in 1887 in the Karsh Theatre, Moscow, it flopped. Chekhov had written it in ten days, not wanting to miss the start of the serf-hunting season. Serfdom had been outlawed over twenty-five years earlier by Tsar Alesandr II, but they could still be acquired for the right price from certain purveyors in Minsk. When he went to the opening night of ‘Ivanov’, Chekhov was appalled and ashamed at what he had created. In a letter to his proctologist, he confessed: “I barely gave half a brain to the whole endeavour, so focused was I on bagging me a serf or two. The play was a sham, bereft of a moral core, and disturbingly naked of any form of drapery. It was an embarrassment to me. I must correct it.“*3
Chekhov was a man of his word, and that word was ‘lymph’. But he diligently reworked the play, significantly adding a small pair of black drapes to symbolise Anna’s tuberculosis. It was put on in St Petersburg and was an immediate success both with audiences and the respiratory diseases community.
One of the initial problems with ‘The Wood Demon’ (1889) and why he felt compelled to rework it into ‘Uncle Vanya’ (1897) was its complete lack of drapes. “It seems strange now, looking back, that Chekhov should have abandoned the drapes motif that had served him so well in ‘Ivanov’,“ said Buck Fizz’s Cheryl Baker in an interview with ‘Pull the Other One – Drapes Quarterly’*4, “but what one has to remember is that during the 1890s there was a significant development in Russia’s industrialisation and consequently a large increase in the urban middle class. And, like middle class anywhere they were drapery crazy.“
Being naturally a rebellious figure – see the controversy he caused with his 1897 novella ‘Peasants’ – Chekhov initially refused to pander to the curtain zeitgeist. However, what Chekhov came to realise was that he could satirise these nouveau riche through the medium of drapes and thus they reappeared in force in his works, reigniting his love of the theatre. As a consequence, the vermillion checked drapes used by Chekhov in ‘The Seagull’ (1896) are seen by scholars as a searing indictment of urban pretension.
Once again, Professor Catherine Klinger spoke about this on Newsnight: “The choice of vermillion is interesting and clearly represents the rise of the Bolsheviks, however what caused an outrage was the checks. They seemed to mock the proletariat. It led to uproar amongst the academia with Leo Tolstoy famously describing Chekhov as ‘a shit’.“*5
For a while, it looked like Chekhov’s career was doomed. However, Stanislavski’s 1898 Moscow Art Theatre production saved both the play and Chekhov’s reputation. By replacing the vermillion checked drapes with a thicker weaved striped puce set, he repositioned the play as a tragedy of interior decorating overzealousness in contrast to Chekhov’s intended purpose of it being a comedy. Still to this day, die-hard Chekhovians will indicate their allegiance to the late playwright by having vermillion checks tattooed on their lower abdomen, just over the spleen.
Emboldened by the controversy and academic debate caused by the vermillion checked drapes in ‘The Seagull’, Chekhov reworked ‘The Wood Demon’ into ‘Uncle Vanya’. “Uncle Vanya himself is a metaphor for thick curtain fabric drapes, Sonya, insipid net curtains, and Astrov Venetian blinds. Consequently, Sonya and Astrov’s pleas for Vanya to return the vial of morphine and not top himself, reflects that ultimately all other forms of window coverage to block light emitted or reflected by celestial bodies are inferior and merely serve to preserve the continuing importance of drapes.“*6 These words written by George Bernard Shaw in the ‘Saturday Review’ in 1914 after viewing the first English production of the play at the Almeida are still considered the quintessential interpretation of the play when viewed through a drapery lens, although more recently the literary critic MH Abrams suggested that Uncle Vanya himself is supposed to be thin muslin curtains in his article “Well Pull Yourself Together Then – Uncle Vanya as the Punchline to a Very Poor Joke“ in the New York Times (13/9/2010).
By the time ‘The Seagull’ started wowing the Muscovite crowds, Chekhov was becoming heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and made frequent references to the following exert from Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ volume II:
“Every right-minded citizen should detest curtains – hanging in mid-air, disconnected from the earth which is the domain of the proletariat. They are aloof; they are the delusions of grandeur of the elitist bourgeoisie. I find them grossly effeminate. Drapes however, drapes have weight, substance. Drapes are real. They wallow in the grit and dust of everyday existence.“*7
Before commencing his work on ‘Three Sisters’ (1901), Chekhov spent most of 1900 working in a drapery factory on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg. Stanislavski had insisted that for the authenticity of his work, the playwright should live amongst drapes. “Fidelity is key,“ he wrote in a letter to Chekhov that year, “one cannot write about drapes truthfully unless you have lived with drapes, amongst drapes, as drapes.“*8 Towards the end of the year, Chekhov declared that he had become ‘a pair of double woven cotton drapes in a light shade of mauve bordered with a repeated seashell pattern’ and spent six weeks dangling from a curtain rail in the living room of a Mr and Mrs Gregorovich in Nizhny Novgorod. Many years later, Jane Goodall would employ this Stanislavskian ‘method approach’ in preparing to write the screenplay for ‘King Kong Escapes’ (1967).
Inspired by his time as drapes, Chekhov produced his most realistic and relatable drapes in ‘Three Sisters’. For the first time he suggested that the drapes be played by part of the ensemble, and in the original version even had them say lines acting as the consciences of the ‘three sisters’:
(Here Olga, the eldest of the three sisters, and her sister-in-law Natasha are arguing about the octogenarian maidservant, Anfisa)
Olga: She’s been with us for thirty years.
Natasha: But now she can’t work! Either I don’t understand something or you don’t want to understand me. She is not capable of working, she only sleeps or sits.
Olga: Then let her sit.
Olga Drapes: What a bitch. She should try dusting for seventy years; see if she needs a sit down.
Critics weren’t kind: “It seems a huge waste of Sofya Giatsintova’s talents to have her spend the entire four acts standing with her arms outstretched with two bed-sheets draped over them just for her to occasionally hurl insults at Natasha or comment on the firmness of Baron Tuzenbach’s buttocks. Surely Chekhov and Stanislavski should have allowed Savitskaya to portray this in the subtext of her own delivery of the role.“*9 These words of the ‘What’s On in Moscow?’ review were echoed in the majority of reviews.
Fearing the audience would abandon them, Chekhov removed the spoken roles of the drapes and instead replaced them with three sets of drapes in hues that reflected the temperament of the three sisters. This move proved transformative and both critics and the audience alike lavished the play with praise. The same critic that had ridiculed the use of Giatsintova wrote: “The drapes are magnificent. Initially, the three sets, although of different hues, complement each other and show the sororal bonds that are at the heart of the play. The dramatic shift comes at the start of Act II when Natasha puts up her own set of drapes in a lurid pink that clashes horribly with the others and leads to Kulygin declaring ‘I’d rather listen to my Uncle’s stories about the poor quality of the borsht available during the Crimean War, then have to experience that shade of pink any longer!’“.*10
Chekhov’s final play, ‘The Cherry Orchard’ (1904), in a very real sense finished him off. Technically it was consumption, but the furore surrounding the development of the piece certainly didn’t help his medical condition. Chekhov had insisted that the play was a comedy, yet Stanislavski interpreted it as a tragedy simply on the naïve assumption that it’d couldn’t be a comedy as Chekhov hadn’t put any jokes in it. Chekhov however insisted that small scale deforestation is inherently funny because it is implied that the men all had big choppers and used them to cut down the ‘cherry’ orchard – it was a metaphor for a mass loss of virginity. Stanislavski suggested that they played it straight and let the audience decide.
This might have been the end of it, except for one thing. Stanislavski felt that drapery was no longer relevant, that they had gone as far as they could with drapes, that the audience wouldn’t accept a rehash of earlier drapes, and insisted that shutters be used instead in the production.
Chekhov went ape.
“Shutters are an abomination.“ He wrote in a fiery letter to Stanislavski, now held at the ‘Anton Chekhov Memorial House’ in Moscow. “I don’t have a problem with wood, but the only connection it should have with windows is as a frame. Keep wood to the edges. It’s got no place filling up the space. No-one wants a pie filled with crust. You are a colossal arse and you’re ruining my comedy. Yours, as ever, Anton.“*11
Stanislavski held firm and only shutters appeared in the performance. Later that year, Chekhov died in disgust.
Upon reflection, Chekhov had built on a great tradition of drapery in religion and drama: one thinks of the temple’s curtain being rent asunder at Christ’s death, Polonius being stabbed through the arras in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and of course the safety curtain at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. But what Chekhov did was use it to reflect the then modern Russian society, the ending of the ruling of the Tsars, the collapse of the aristocracy. He was holding up a curtain to society rather than a mirror and saying ‘don’t be lazy, have a look yourself’.
Sources:
*1 “Newsnight Review“ – BBC2 (11th November 1997)
*2 Bragg, M. (1971) ‘Hopeless Harrison Rex Chekhov TV Play’ The Times (15th July 1971)
*3 Button, J. – editor (2013) ‘A Probing Question – The Collected Letters of Anton Chekhov to his Proctologist’. London. Penguin.
*4 Warthog, I (1987) ‘Fizzing with Cheryl’. ‘Pull the Other One – Drapes Quarterly Vol. 17 (3)
*5 “Newsnight Review“ – BBC2 (11th November 1997)
*6 Bernard-Shaw, G (1914) ‘Uncle Van-YEAH! – Chekhov’s Smash Hit’ Saturday Review (12th April 1914)
*7 Marx. K. (1985) ‘Das Kapital’ vol II Chapter 4 ‘Home Furnishings and their relation to the oppression and subjugation of the Proletariat’ London.
*8 Button, J. – editor (2010) ‘Stan and Me – The Collected Correspondence between Anton Chekhov and Konstantin Stanislavski’. London. Penguin.
*9 Puscovich, T. (1901) ‘Curtains of the Minds? – Chekhov’s Three Sisters Fails to Impress’ What’s on in Moscow? (14th April 1901)
*10 Puscovich, T. (1901) ‘Dashing Drapes are Dramatic Gold!’ What’s on in Moscow? (19th May 1901)*11 Button, J. – editor (2010) ‘Stan and Me – The Collected Correspondence between Anton Chekhov and Konstantin Stanislavski’. London. Penguin.
Treatises of Gloria 