契诃夫剧作
出版社:安徽文艺出版社
出版日期:1998
ISBN:9787539615523
作者:(俄)契诃夫
页数:405页
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精彩书评 (总计3条)
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契诃夫的小说我并不看好，喜欢的是他的戏剧。平淡、单调、反情节、没有冲突，主题消退，不知所云。这些都是戏剧的大忌，契诃夫全部拥有，就像樱桃园里那一声诡异的提琴，他创造了内心的戏剧，他不间断的书写人内心的失落与渴求。这世界本身有可能是平淡而落寞的，为何要戏剧化呢。 -
Theatre Must Teach:Analysis of Chekhov and Brecht’s DramaturgyLux Bai19 November 2010Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The examination of life is as important as life itself. Theatre, as an influential and effective examiner of reality must always be higher than the audience, to invoke reflection and introspection, whether to audience itself or to the times. Two great dramatists, Brecht and Chekhov, both strong believers of the statement “Theater must teach” hold different understanding of the educational significance of the theatre. In this essay, I will discuss their dramaturgy on how and what theatre should teach and the techniques they use to realize their purposes with two of their representative works: The Wedding and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.Both Brecht and Chekhov agree the basis of the educational significance of the theatre is its representation of the reality. The theatre facilitates the audience to observe the reality more clearly and objectively by providing new perspectives on stage. That is why art, according to Chekhov, should aim at “unconditional and honest truth”, rather than create false spectacles that lack realistic significance, like Vaudevilles in Chekhov’s contemporary times. Failing to reflect reality or invoke critical thinking will deprive the theatre’s power to teach and descends it to sheer entertainment.Brecht and Chekhov, although belonging to different times and genres, share similar views on reality. As Chekhov said: “the serious always alternates with the trivial”, both two playwrights, against representing life as either tragedy or comedy, observe reality as juxtaposition of “the important and the paltry, the great and the base, the tragic and the ridiculous”. Fully aware of the serious societal contradictions, such as corruption of the humanity and conflicts between classes, they still honestly keep the comicality of life on the stage. While Chekhov invents the new form of “sad comicality”, Brecht also combines humor with its rather serious themes in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Act II in which the “dying” man miraculously recovers after hearing the news he will not be drafted to war is recognized as one of the funniest scenes in the twentieth century. The mixture of the suffering and the ridiculous on stage show the realities they observe are likewise rounded and complicated.Another similarity between Brecht and Chekhov is their belief in man’s power to change the reality. According to Aristotle, reality lies in the “casual links” between events, which in a sense suggests predestination. The tragedy of Oedipus, although very effective in invoking catharsis, displays fortune’s power over man’s life. In contrast, both Brecht and Chekhov have faith in man’s free will and his ability to change. As Chekhov said, people will “most certainly create another and better life for themselves” when they come to the realization of the corruption of their lives. Likewise, Brecht adopts the “epic theatre” to show “the world is what it is becoming”. In fact, one of the major themes of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is the possibility of the exchange of power. To Chekhov and Brecht, that is exactly the core value of the theatre: to motivate the audience to make changes through examination of life. While agreeing reality is the basis of the educational significance of the theatre, Chekhov and Brecht hold opposite views on how theatre should teach. Deeply influenced by Naturalism, Chekhov regards art as another form of science. He believes the artist must be “as objective as a chemist”, recording the reality exactly as it is. As he remains an “unbiased witness” to the characters, the audience learns from the theatre by drawing their own conclusions. Chekhov realizes this idea by inventing a new structure of play in which no resolution is given. In The Wedding, after all conflicts and secrets have gradually been revealed, the play reaches its climax at Revunov’s utterance of realization: “How revolting! How disgusting!” However, it is soon appeased by the continuation of the wedding, with nothing changed or resolved the play ends. The audience can draw very broad conclusions for no preconceived idea is addressed throughout the whole performance.As Chekhov teaches by encouraging free interpretations of reality, Brecht does so by conveying explicit messages. He puts forward his conclusions directly on stage, even separated for each act. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, as the major thesis is “the land should go to those who can use it best”, each act exists for itself, conveying an independent thesis. While the thesis statements express Brecht’s political views, the resolution of the story let the spectators experience another possibility of reality, thus motivates them to make changes.As a matter of fact, the different ways of teaching by Brecht and Chekhov teach indicate their different teaching contents. Their distinctive views on the relationship between human and the society has caused such divergence. Chekhov believes in man’s power over environment while Brecht believes the environment’s power over man. To Chekhov, man changes the reality by changing himself while Brecht holds the reverse opinion that “social reality determines thought”: man must change the rules of the world to change his destiny. In order to examine humanity, Chekhov emphasizes characters over plots in most of his plays. By avoiding situational conflicts, he suggests it is certain inner characteristics of people, such as materialistic and selfishness that makes life horrible. As a typical portrait play, The Wedding depicts dynamic, multi-dimensional and fully developed characters, showing the audience the complication of human nature and human relationship. In order to exemplify certain characteristics, Chekhov bestows some characters taglines in their dialogues. Although the device often simplifies roles into stereotypes, in The Wedding it creates the opposite effects: revealing hidden qualities of the characters. For example, the midwife Zmeyukina’s constant exclamation “I need atmosphere!” shows not her cultivation but her vanity. Yat’s tagline “Spectacular!” reveals not only his admiration for Zmeyukina but also his fickleness for the audience knows about his pursuit of Dashenka not long before. Utterances with similar satirical purposes appear prevailingly in the Wedding: the mispronounced French words, “monkeyshines” by Zhigalov and so on. Instead of symbolizing the characters, these taglines disclose of the characters in depth and add humor to them. Similarly, the relationship between the characters is just as intricate. For example, Aplombov, while acting like a dignified gentleman on the surface, marries for dowry and impudently threatens Nastaya when she attempts to breaks her promise. Nastaya, totally aware of his attempt, also takes the marriage as a mercenary trade, regardless her daughter’s happiness. In the workshop in order to show the subtle relationship between the two to the audience, we designed a chase on stage, which achieved satisfying outcome. All of the development of characters and relationship aim at making the drama as realistic as possible, thus deepening the audience’s understanding of humanity.While Chekhov focuses on the examination of individuals, Brecht encourages the audience to concentrate on societal issues. Unlike Chekhov’s self-improvement strategy, Brecht aims at invoking the audience to change the rules of the world. By depicting characters as victims of circumstance, he stresses on the severe effects societal contradictions cause to innocent individuals. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Grusha, according to Brecht, should be seen as a “victim of her class and the war” in the corrupted society. At the end of Act I, Singer narrates the scene where Grusha is left alone with the baby and hears it calling to her. If I were to direct this scene, I would stage Singer circling around Grusha and talking in her ears when he narrates, and kneeling down near the baby calling to Grusha in a thin gentle voice as if he were the baby. Grusha on the other hand should act like completely unaware of Singer’s existence. As the omniscience narrator, Singer is like the director of all actions, a representation of the society that determines man’s destiny. The baby, whose words spoken by Singer in a fake voice, indicates its identification as an incarnation of Singer. They are both embodiments of the powerful society, who is the actual “seducer” in the play. Grusha as an innocent victim, is totally ignorant of the social force behind her decision, therefore cannot see the Singer. By observing Grusha, the representative of the oppressed class becoming the victim, the audience should realize the rules of the world must be changed. In this sense, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is revolutionary with its political significance. However how the audience, after seeing Grusha as a “puppet” incapable of making decisions, still has confidence in man’s power over the environment remains a question. Determined by the contents Chekhov and Brecht prefer to teach in the theatre, the dramatic devices they apply differ greatly. Chekhov, focusing on individuals, wishes the spectators to identify themselves with the characters, therefore prefers the theatre to be as realistic as possible. Brecht, concentrating on the society, encourages the audience to think objectively without emotional involvement, thus wishes to de-familiarize the theatre to the fullest extent.In order to achieve realistic effects of The Wedding, high imitation of life is essential in every aspects of theatre from casting, customs, dialogues to settings, lightings, sound effects and so on. Chekhov abandons the traditional well-made dialogues and replaces them with realistic casual chatting. The characters wonder between trivial topics, making silly or mundane remarks. In workshop, we experienced constantly interrupting with each other to create a realistic heated conversation. Regarding the setting, I suggest setting up a corridor in the air with stairs at one end and two exits to backstage at both ends. It will create a boisterous atmosphere with people on both floors. A corridor, acting like “the second floor” with the stairs allows the “chasing” between Zmeyukina and Yat to be more entertaining and realistic seen from the audience. Besides, separated from downstairs, the corridor creates private space for the characters in need to talk in secret (e.g. Nynunin and Nastasya talking about the deal with the general). Costume as a part of character building should reveal the most important property of a role. I would have Dymba dressed in a white suit to show his inappropriateness and Yat with his hair oily and carefully done to suggest his fickleness. Zmeyukina, demanding attention desperately, should wear a flamboyant colorful dress and a ridiculously looking feathered hat. Near the end of the play, when Revunov realizes the terrible people around him, instead of facing the characters and the audience, he could turn his back to everybody as he exclaimed “How revolting! How disgusting!” It is more realistic this way for even the view of them disgusts him. Also, the sight of his back will make the audience feel abandoned thus invoke self-introspection. In Chekhov’s play, every aspect of the theatre should aim at revealing various qualities of the characters incisively and vividly because the more realistic the characters are on stage, the more effective the identification will be.In contrast, Brecht uses A-effect to prevent the audience from being emotionally involved, leading the audience to concentrate on the larger social issues the play reflected. The A-effect refers to two different processes: the emotional detachment between the audience and the action on stage; the distance between the spectator and the world they are in. Brecht uses the former to create latter so the audience could think objectively towards the social reality.A-effects involve using epic theatre with many dramatic techniques to remind the audience what happens on stage is unreal. The common techniques include third person point of view, foreshadowing, full body gestures, one-dimensional characterization, no forth wall and so on. In the following paragraphs I will discuss some of our experiments with A-effects in workshop and my own speculations on directing The Caucasian Chalk Circle with Brecht’s dramaturgy.According to Brecht, the actor must act with the clear gestures of “showing”, meaning displaying the action as clearly as possible to the audience. In workshop when playing Grusha in the flirt scene, the student used her full body to reproduce the incident by the river (rolling up her pants little by little), as if deliberately seducing Simon in front of the audience. The audience reacted with laughter because the gestures were highly exaggerated compared to real life experiences. When rehearsing the poem scene, attempting to let Grusha “tell her feelings” instead of “embodying her feelings”, we tried changing the poem’s point of view from first person to third person. However, while changing of words did not much change the emotions received by the audience, it might also cause confusion to spectators unfamiliar with Brecht’s dramaturgy. A better alternative would be having the poem read by a narrator offstage with the third person point of view “When you returen she shall be there…and her mouth will be unkissed”. Grusha in the meanwhile should be dancing to the music played by an orchestra placed on stage. Special lightings must also follow the rhythm of the music. This arrangement would create a dreamlike unrealistic picture while the narrator keeps us observing from a distance. However, Grusha must begin and end the poem by herself in first person: “Simon Shashava, I shall wait for you” to avoid confusion.Since the characters in The Caucasian Chalk Circle are flat and simple stereotypes with comical elements, they are to some extent similar to cartoon characters. Cartoons, being highly unrealistic, possess many features we could adopt to create A-effects: ridiculous costumes, characters with obvious comic features and so on. For instance, the two doctors, if one is tall and thin with a high-pitched voice while the other is short and chubby with a low-pitched voice, could create both comical and alienation effects. Also, like in the traditional Chinese and Japanese drama, the actors could wear masks or heavy make-ups to create absurdity. Singer as the narrator in The Caucasian Chalk Circle is in a sense the destiny creator, could be played by a child or dressed like a fool (like Fool in King Lear). While indicating the irony that real power is often in disguise, it also creates the absurdity of the theatre (for a child tells fables and a fool says nonsense), reminding the audience the falsehood of the story. Regarding the setting, either bare stage or historical settings would be suitable for this play. Effects of theoretical fogs or smokes can also be adopted when Singer starts the story to create a mysterious dreamlike atmosphere. People in the background (the crowds, beggars and petitioners) should be static like a picture until the narrator starts telling the story. The actors and settings should move simultaneously in accordance with the flow of the story, indicating the absolute power of the society. The above experiments and speculations on The Caucasian Chalk Circle are all based on Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect. Through analyzing texts, watching plays and experimenting in person, I found the theory vey feasible in most aspects of the theatre. Undoubtedly, the alienation effects have caused great impacts on people’s perspectives on the educational role of drama and have contributed greatly to the development of the theatre. However, there are still questions to be answered: For audience unfamiliar with Brecht’s theory, are the alienation effects still effective? Spectators may be confused by the absurd dramatic devices thus fail to relate the “fable” to their own reality. Also, for audience aware of the purpose of the alienation effects, are these deliberate techniques really necessary? These questions regarding the teaching qualities of alienation effects require further examination. Both strong supporters of the educational significance of the theatre, Brecht and Chekhov have divergence of views on how and what theatre should teach. To illustrate with an analogy, artists are like teachers: While Chekhov teaches humanities with scientific method, Brecht teaches politics with artistic techniques. However, it is their shared deep concern for human beings, compassion for the sufferers and belief in man’s power to change for the better have driven them to continuously create masterpieces that contribute important realistic significance and artistic values to the world. -
剧本提到康斯坦丁之死有四处。一处在康斯坦丁将打死的海鸥扔到妮娜面前说：“我不久之后会照着这样子打死自己。”一处他母亲阿尔卡基娜离开乡下时曾经与康斯坦丁的说：“我走了以后，你可答应我再不要耍这个砰砰响的了吧？”一处是在最后他已经自杀的时候，他母亲用两手蒙上脸说：“他那种样子叫我的眼睛发黑。”最后一处是多尔恩跟特里果林说：“康斯坦丁·加福利洛维奇刚刚自杀了。”在前面说的四处中的第二处，他已经尝试过自杀了，但是最后以失败告终。我认为他自杀的理由不过两个：1.认为自己才气不足；2.妮娜代表爱情，但是不爱自己。在剧本的开头，他就说出自己的才气不被重视，倘若没有母亲和父亲的光环，别人可能连看都不看自己一眼。强权下的弱者，可以这样形容吗？在父母的光环下，他形成的自卑感，用他母亲的话来说就是颓废派。就她刚开始演的那场戏，说一切艺术应该脱离物质。不知道为什么我此时想到的是柏拉图，世间的一切理性精神是永恒不变。如果物质的不永恒，那么艺术这精神世界的产物怎么要靠它来表现呢？康斯坦丁借说艺术来说自己，不需要显赫的出生，只需要能被人认可的能力。此时的他没有被爱情抛弃。直至后来，他发现妮娜的眼神越来越不在他身上，关注点慢慢移到特里果林上了。爱情事业的双重尸斑，对于一个天生自卑来说是多么大的打击。所以，康斯坦丁第一次自杀。自杀未遂，母子和好。而母亲对特里果林的爱是众所周知。特里果林在喜欢妮娜的同时又没有跟自己的母亲断的干净，我想康斯坦丁是抱着妮娜在发现特里果林的真面目后会回到自己身边的心情。应该是在他母亲和特里果林的那段对话中看到了自己和妮娜的希望。直至后来，他在离开乡下的时候仍关注妮娜的一举一动。事业和爱情在最后的两年，爱情才是他最大的支柱。事业的希望是爱情给的。妮娜喜欢的人是作家，而自己也是作家，比较心里肯定是有。但比较之后，他发现自己和特里果林的差距。但是后来，康斯坦丁回到乡下的时候，得知妮娜即使被特里果林抛弃了仍然喜欢他，这相当于把他原本微小的希望彻底熄灭了。在加上妮娜将自己比成海鸥，一个偶然走来，看见了它，因无事可做，就毁灭了它。妮娜说的而是人是特里果林，但是海鸥是康斯坦丁打死的，被他误会也不一定。或者，康斯坦丁认为妮娜的失败是他造成的，加入他没有打死海鸥，特里果林不会看到海鸥，也就不会有短篇小说的想法，而妮娜就不会过得那么痛苦。但我个人还是很喜欢康斯坦丁的剧本。人，狮子，鹰和鹧鸪，长着犄角的鹿，鹅，蜘蛛，居住在水中的无言的鱼，海盘车，和一切肉眼所看不见的生灵——总之，一切生命，一切，一切，豆子完成他们凄惨的变化历程之后绝迹了······到现在，大地已经有千万不在负荷着任何一个活的东西，可怜的月亮徒然点着它的明灯。草地上，早晨不在扬起鹭鸶的长鸣，菩提树里再也听不见小金虫的低鸣······一切没有希望。康斯坦丁认为自己没有希望了，那么只有死亡。其实他是一个活在别人的阴影下的人，却总是在自己的世界里折磨自己。他不明白妮娜喜欢特里果林，就像不知道玛莎喜欢他。他看到的只有失败。他的死是注定的。走不出阴影何以看见光明。
精彩短评 (总计19条)
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读契诃夫的剧作，常常会陷入“怎样生活才是真正活过”的思索。无论是正剧还是喜剧，每一篇都直击泪点，最爱排序：万尼亚舅舅＞海鸥＞樱桃园＞伊凡诺夫＞三姐妹。 -
这里面所有的人都在沉沦，有些在挣扎中绝望，有些在混混噩噩中走向终点。契诃夫近乎狂热地表现着生活的平庸、乏味、无可奈何，就连死亡也不是解脱。 -
最喜的是伊凡诺夫和海鸥 -
写实主义戏剧最高峰 -
火车上读完了。小人物的家庭悲喜剧，《三姐妹》比较乱，《万尼亚舅舅》是清晰的。为什么对契诃夫就是不感冒。 -
没有他的小说犀利。 -
一个人的自杀过程。 -
海鷗和櫻桃園都堪稱完美神作... -
很多作家都给我这种“哇哦他可能真的很厉害但是我还是不太喜欢”……契诃夫是其中之一。而且俄国人名真TMD难记…… -
经典 -
有一天我会到莫斯科去。 -
伊凡诺夫 海鸥 万尼亚舅舅 三姐妹 樱桃园 -
迄今为止最喜欢的剧作家，简直太棒了，读一遍重新认识一遍。 -
土鳖如我，上大学才知道契诃夫写过剧本 -
又见戏中戏=。= -
补上，之前下的pdf叫契诃夫戏剧集，差点当成焦菊隐翻译的。 -
从那时起我过了些时候，又开始读《樱桃园》并将永远读下去。 -
除了《樱桃园》，都看了。契诃夫的天才在于：他总能描绘出生活最真实的那种空洞状态。理想主义面对苍凉的现实之后漫溢出来的伤感和压抑。 -
如果你读过他的小说，为什么不读读他的戏剧呢？