Anton Chekhov's life featured in play

Taiwan theater director Stan Lai's latest productions, I Take Your Hand in Mine and The Seagull (above),are a tribute to Anton Chekhov. Photos by Li Yan / China Daily

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In China, Chekhov is to be read rather than to be staged. His fiction has gained a wide following, but his plays are more venerated than embraced. Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya were presented in Beijing as early as the 1950s, and The Seagull in the 1980s. "There were not many people in the audience and more than half of them left during the intermission," recalls Tong Dao-ming, a theater scholar, critic and translator.

But among the limited coterie of fans was Cao Yu, China's indisputable master of theater. After reading Three Sisters, he wrote, in 1935: "A play as great as this, yet with no pretentious interludes, only living souls walking in and out, features people with souls, not dramatic moments. The structure is quite flat and there's no narrative upheaval, but it grips my heart and soul, almost halting my breathing. I was lost in the melancholia. How I want to be a humble student to this teacher Chekhov."

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), poet Liu Shahe had to burn his collection of Chekhov books, lamenting: "I cannot keep you/I cannot hide you. Tonight I send you to the oven. Farewell, Chekhov. You, with a mustache and glasses, are smiling at me/Me, I'm crying at the smoke evaporating and the light vanishing/Farewell, Chekhov!"

Fast forward to 2004, the "Year of Chekhov" as declared by UNESCO. China ran a monthlong program of Chekhov plays, including touring productions from Israel and Canada. A Russian edition of The Cherry Orchard was presented back-to-back with a Chinese production, directed by the venerated Lin Zhaohua and starring Jiang Wenli, a luminary on the big and small screens as well as the stage. (In 1998, Lin merged Three Sisters with Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot for the Beijing audience.)

This time, Jiang is playing Olga, who gets to reprise tiny portions of her role in The Cherry Orchard and other plays. By "her role", I mean Jiang's role as well as Olga's role.

"Chekhov is not very accessible. Those who truly understand him will find that he was avant-garde, even more so when we look back 100 years from his era," says Lai, who was immersed in Chekhov when he was studying for his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. "Today's avant-garde pales next to him. They are imitating the facade, but Chekhov is a pioneer in dramatic structure. You'd have to step back to see the beauty of it."