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Are You There, Crocodile?: Inventing Anton Chekhov
Michael Pennington's work on his solo show about Anton Chekhov has taken London's "Russian Actor" from the Trans-Siberian Railway to Soviet and post-Soviet Moscow, into the repertoires of the National Theatre and the Old Vic and across Europe. Are You There, Crocodile? also includes accounts of his work on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , Tolstoy's Strider and other Russian projects, as well as essays on Chekhov's four masterpieces.
- GenresBiography
218 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2003
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June 6, 2009
WARNING: I already have a neon green crush the size of Rhode Island on Michael Pennington dating from his English Shakespeare Company portrayals of Richard II, Prince Hal and Henry V (yes I know Hal and Henry are the same person....basically) and I adore Anton Chekhov. Mashing the two of them together is one of those great ideas like crème brûlée ice cream.
More soberly, while he was on a Trans-Siberian Express trip in 1975, Pennington met an American poet who, on seeing the actor reading a biography of Chekhov, told him he ought to do a one-man show about the playwright. Pennington half-resisted and half-worked on the idea for about ten years until it abruptly came together in 1984, when he was offered the opportunity to take it on tour for two years; after that I think he dropped it for most of the eighties & nineties (while he was busy with the ESC) until there were some revivals, and now there is this account of how he wrote the show, and the latest performance text of the show itself is included -- interestingly, almost as an afterthought. Famously the show consists only of Chekhov's own words, from his plays, letters, stories, and reported conversation, and Pennington did an enormous amount of research over more than twenty years, which will not surprise readers of his Shakespeare User's Guides -- and, as there, here too he wears his learning lightly but it is considerable: the street smarts of a life in the theatre combined with book knowledge.
The text of the show itself, inevitably, suffers from being only presented in cold print and not performed, and after Pennington's long account of it, its patchwork quality is more apparent than might be otherwise, especially when it would be pulled together by such a loving impersonation. In any other presentation, there would be a short nonfiction foreword to this text; here instead the text is almost an excuse for a short memoir, which is wonderful -- not 'just' about Chekhov and the theatre, but about how favourite authors stay with us, change us, almost befriend us. Pennington says in the beginning of the book that Chekhov is, 'among those I could never meet....perhaps my favourite man.' He quotes Chekhov's grief at the loss of Tolstoy ('how shall we be writers now?'), and other people echo it throughout the book -- that Chekhov somehow teaches us how to live; how shall we be people now? When we read books, the words of the authors can become part of our psyches; when we love writers, we take them in and they transform us, somehow become part of us. With Chekhov, for many people, that process becomes even more important; like the other two writers in that great triptych, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, it is as if he teaches us how to live, but without didacticism or fanaticism.
It's well-written, charming and lively, as has been everything else I've read by him, with lots of little wonderful literary and theatrical anecdotes. The book is written in an impressionistic style -- moving forward and backward in time (thankfully with chronological headers, so we don't get lost), threading in accounts of performing Raskalnikov and Tolstoy's Strider, and treating the dry overfamiliar biographical facts so personally it's like listening to one friend talk about another. Perhaps the great point of the book is not the two set pieces I already mentioned, or the wonderful discussions of all the major plays (apparently when he first performed the piece Pennington basically refused to talk about them!), the dramatizations of Chekhov witnessing an inmate being whipped in Siberia or the transformation of his near-Gothic story 'The Black Monk' into an acceptance of his own death....but Pennington's account of the death of his own father, from a sudden heart attack, just as he was about to begin performing the show. This takes place nearly halfway through the book itself, at the end of Part II, and at first it is too sad to be borne. Pennington opens Part III with a reminiscence of his parents seeing him in Three Sisters in 1971, and he moves from his own experience performing in Chekhov's play, to an account of Chekhov writing his play, to a consideration of the characters and the themes in the play itself, finally ending with how General Prozorov's death has affected his three daughters....it is like listening to Beethoven's Quartet in A minor, Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart, witnessing how art can not only comfort and solace but heal us. Pennington quotes from his own version of Chekhov at that moment:
What if, by some miracle, this present turned out to be a dream, a hideous nightmare, and we were to awake renewed and cleansed, strong, upright and proud? Why do we never try to stand again when once we've fallen? When we lose one thing why don't we search for another? I want our lives to be holy, sublime and solemn as the vault of heaven. Let us live! The thief on the cross had hope even though he had less than an hour left to him, and the sun only rises once a day, so take hold of what's left of your life and save it.
Chekhov's urgent appeals often have this a direct, personal quality, as if a friend had taken us by the hand and were urging us to indeed save our own lives -- it is to Pennington's great credit he brings Chekhov even closer, giving Chekhov's words his own breath.
More soberly, while he was on a Trans-Siberian Express trip in 1975, Pennington met an American poet who, on seeing the actor reading a biography of Chekhov, told him he ought to do a one-man show about the playwright. Pennington half-resisted and half-worked on the idea for about ten years until it abruptly came together in 1984, when he was offered the opportunity to take it on tour for two years; after that I think he dropped it for most of the eighties & nineties (while he was busy with the ESC) until there were some revivals, and now there is this account of how he wrote the show, and the latest performance text of the show itself is included -- interestingly, almost as an afterthought. Famously the show consists only of Chekhov's own words, from his plays, letters, stories, and reported conversation, and Pennington did an enormous amount of research over more than twenty years, which will not surprise readers of his Shakespeare User's Guides -- and, as there, here too he wears his learning lightly but it is considerable: the street smarts of a life in the theatre combined with book knowledge.
The text of the show itself, inevitably, suffers from being only presented in cold print and not performed, and after Pennington's long account of it, its patchwork quality is more apparent than might be otherwise, especially when it would be pulled together by such a loving impersonation. In any other presentation, there would be a short nonfiction foreword to this text; here instead the text is almost an excuse for a short memoir, which is wonderful -- not 'just' about Chekhov and the theatre, but about how favourite authors stay with us, change us, almost befriend us. Pennington says in the beginning of the book that Chekhov is, 'among those I could never meet....perhaps my favourite man.' He quotes Chekhov's grief at the loss of Tolstoy ('how shall we be writers now?'), and other people echo it throughout the book -- that Chekhov somehow teaches us how to live; how shall we be people now? When we read books, the words of the authors can become part of our psyches; when we love writers, we take them in and they transform us, somehow become part of us. With Chekhov, for many people, that process becomes even more important; like the other two writers in that great triptych, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, it is as if he teaches us how to live, but without didacticism or fanaticism.
It's well-written, charming and lively, as has been everything else I've read by him, with lots of little wonderful literary and theatrical anecdotes. The book is written in an impressionistic style -- moving forward and backward in time (thankfully with chronological headers, so we don't get lost), threading in accounts of performing Raskalnikov and Tolstoy's Strider, and treating the dry overfamiliar biographical facts so personally it's like listening to one friend talk about another. Perhaps the great point of the book is not the two set pieces I already mentioned, or the wonderful discussions of all the major plays (apparently when he first performed the piece Pennington basically refused to talk about them!), the dramatizations of Chekhov witnessing an inmate being whipped in Siberia or the transformation of his near-Gothic story 'The Black Monk' into an acceptance of his own death....but Pennington's account of the death of his own father, from a sudden heart attack, just as he was about to begin performing the show. This takes place nearly halfway through the book itself, at the end of Part II, and at first it is too sad to be borne. Pennington opens Part III with a reminiscence of his parents seeing him in Three Sisters in 1971, and he moves from his own experience performing in Chekhov's play, to an account of Chekhov writing his play, to a consideration of the characters and the themes in the play itself, finally ending with how General Prozorov's death has affected his three daughters....it is like listening to Beethoven's Quartet in A minor, Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart, witnessing how art can not only comfort and solace but heal us. Pennington quotes from his own version of Chekhov at that moment:
What if, by some miracle, this present turned out to be a dream, a hideous nightmare, and we were to awake renewed and cleansed, strong, upright and proud? Why do we never try to stand again when once we've fallen? When we lose one thing why don't we search for another? I want our lives to be holy, sublime and solemn as the vault of heaven. Let us live! The thief on the cross had hope even though he had less than an hour left to him, and the sun only rises once a day, so take hold of what's left of your life and save it.
Chekhov's urgent appeals often have this a direct, personal quality, as if a friend had taken us by the hand and were urging us to indeed save our own lives -- it is to Pennington's great credit he brings Chekhov even closer, giving Chekhov's words his own breath.
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