Thank heavens for Chekhov! Master of the mundane, the boring monotony of daily life, the meaningless passage of time, he actually makes the random chaos, the pointless repetitions of day-to-day survival seem somehow rather beautiful. Or at least he helps us to realise that we’re all enduring the same feelings that life is useless and trivial and dull, so why worry. Just get on with it.
Radios Three and Four have been giving us a feast of the Russian writer (born 150 years ago), with plays, features, monologues. It’s been the perfect antidote to this drabbest of all Januarys, now that the snow has gone leaving behind layers of grimy grit through which a few timid bulbs are struggling to peep. Chekhov’s plays and especially his short stories allow us to see that life’s meaning is to be found in the small things, not the big questions. It’s through the slow accretion of what at first seem trivial details that a person’s true character is revealed, that the latent meaning behind the play or story comes into sharply defined focus.
An intriguing Between the Ears, Saturday, on Radio Three (produced by John Goudie), takes us deep into the mystery of Chekhov’s dramatic magic. You may remember the strange, eerie, disturbing noise that suddenly galvanises the desultory conversation in the middle of The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov’s stage instruction is quite precise. It’s a sultry summer’s evening and the family are all sitting on the verandah deep in thought, silent apart from the low muttering of one of the servants from inside the house. ‘Suddenly a distant sound is heard. It seems to come from the sky and is the sound of a breaking string, dying away slowly and sadly.’
How, though, do you recreate the sound of that breaking string? Is Chekhov literally asking for a stagehand to break a violin or guitar string offstage in front of a microphone to amplify the sound through the auditorium, or is it meant to be a metaphor for something much more profound — the presage of what is to come not just for the family as the orchard is sold, but also for Russia itself on the brink of revolution? (The play was first produced in Moscow in 1904; a year later there would be uprisings in St Petersburg and Sebastopol.)
As we heard from one of the contributors to the programme, we may think that theatre, unlike radio, is a visual experience, but actually it’s the ear which is ‘the place in which a suggestion from the stage can trigger a unique and vivid picture in the mind’. Chekhov uses this single sound, perhaps ten seconds long, to express the whole meaning of his play.
Radio Three posed the Chekhov Challenge to an electronic musician, Leafcutter John, who took us through his efforts to come up with a sound that would both startle and echo, shock and resonate. Meanwhile we heard how it had sounded in a 1970s radio broadcast of the play when the Radiophonic Workshop had been called in to assist. The result was rather disappointing — more Doctor Who than Stanislavsky. Without the now-disbanded workshop to help, Leafcutter John layered together sounds created from twisting the green parts of a leek, snapping an old acoustic guitar string, rustling tin foil, playing a few chords on the violin, and recording rumbling thunder and twittering blackbirds from his house in Stamford Hill.
The result was a long way away from Chekhov’s Russian steppe, but the programme was a fascinating dissection of what makes up the sounds we so often take for granted around us. In its careful layering of detail, Chekhov could be found.
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