Russianising Chekhov easy task for exile

Press, 30 August 1984, Page 13

Russianising Chekhov easy task for exile

By

STAN DARLING

Make certain that student’s cap is properly rumpled, put plenty of sequins on that ball gown, and for heaven’s sake, see that the toy dog is properly trained.

Mrs Anita Muling, a Russian emigrant who has lived in Christchurch for 30 years, gave the Court Theatre cast of Chekhov’s play, “The Cherry Orchard,” some inkling of how some people lived — both in appearance and manner — in her home country when the play was first produced 80 years ago.

It was the cast’s first meeting for the production that opens in September. The play’s director, Elric Hooper, had asked his friend to come along to offer some insights to the players, the way she had done for two previous Chekhov productions. Mr Hooper had told the cast they should not approach one of the world’s great plays with too much awe and affection. That could harm their acting. “Anita comes from the culture that bred this play,” he said. “Practically a contemporary,” said Mrs Muling who was born in 1903. Mrs Muling said the play’s characters were ineffectual, as were many Russians in those days, and today. The characters “talk like mad in their homes, but do they do anything? No. they have to toe the line.” Mr Hooper said it was important for the cast to know how people in prerevolutionary Russia reacted to one another, such as servants and masters. “Our ideas of servants are usually gathered through comedies of manners,” he said. The types of kiss bestowed on people in dif-

ferent levels of society would tell a lot, said Mrs Muling, who last saw Russia in 1913, before the revolution. Her father, a Far East diplomat, had taken the family to a posting in China.

She said her mother was stricter than the madame in Chekhov’s last play. Her mother had experienced an even stricter upbringing. Her father had spent seven years studying at the Russian Embassy in Peking before their marriage. The couple were not even allowed to correspond during those years. Mrs Muling was delighted with the chance to pore over suggested designs for the play’s costumes. “Oh, just a minute, a student,” she said about one character. “His cap must be awfully old.” He would have crumpled it up and stuck it in his pocket many times.

An estate clerk “wouldn’t have anything so well cut,” nor would a tramp “have a coat like that. He would

already have cut bits of it off.” Those pieces would have been used as leggings, or rolled up as a pillow. A character wearing a new white hat would take it off and stuff it in his pocket when he approached anyone above his station “because they would know he had pinched it,” said Mrs Muling.

She asked an actor who would play an 85-year-old if he could do the required trembling. In those days, life spans were shorter, and anyone that age would be quite infirm. She asked if the toy dog carried by Charlotta in two acts would behdve himself. It would not take a dog long to create an unwanted embarrassment on stage. Mr Hooper assured her they would take no chances. The dog would always be carried.

A dress worn by the young lady back from Paris should sparkle with sequins, said Mrs Muling.

She was pleased with the dress design for Anya: “She’s sweet. The lace is absolutely perfection.” Anya, aged 17, would have asked her mother’s permission to put her hair up for the ball. Normally, that would not be allowed.

Mrs Muling will check the play translation the cast is using, and suggest changes in wording that might make it truer to the Russian. She will attend a rehearsal and make suggestions from the notes she has made in the script. Mrs Muling said she had never seen “The Cherry Orchard” as a play, and was looking forward to it. She had seen film versions.

During her many years in China, before becoming an exile from yet another communist regime, the plays available had not been Russian.

She was reluctant to talk about her past, she said. “Exiles are exiles, they are all the same.”