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Are You There, Crocodile?
By Michael Pennington
Oberon Books £12.99 (paperback)
279 pages
Dateline: 2nd March, 2007
When you purchase this volume, subtitled Inventing Anton Chekhov,
you're really getting two books for the price of one.
The first couple of hundred pages provide a joint biography of the
Russian doctor, playwright and short story writer and the actor who
is ostensibly his biographer but also tells us much about his own life.
The final section of the book provides a full text of Pennington's
inventively titled "Anton Chekhov", the one-man show that
he toured around the world, to great popular acclaim.
With the exception of William Shakespeare, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
is arguably the greatest playwright that has ever lived. He came from
a Russian peasant family and endured a hard early life, beaten by his
father on a regular basis.
This was followed by a frantic middle period during which he continued
to act as a medical doctor while at the same time he became a famous
playwright and writer of short stories. In this part of his life, this
adventurous and energetic genius also travelled extensively and enjoyed
life to the full until tuberculosis cut him down when he was still only
44.
Michael Pennington feels a real affinity with his subject and as his
book develops, the two lives run side by side, making this into a very
cleverly structured piece of writing. The saddest moment of the book
should have been the happiest, as the opening performance of Anton Chekhov
had to be cancelled after Pennington's much-loved lawyer father died
on the way to attend it.
The writer does far more than merely analyse the major plays, although
he does that with considerable skill, giving a chapter to each. In addition,
he provides an insightful biographical overview of Chekhov, making more
assumptions than the average biographer in his efforts to get to the
core of the man so that he can represent him as accurately as possible
on stage.
This also required Pennington to become familiar with the whole Chekhov
canon to the extent of following in his footsteps across Russia and
into Siberia.
As well as building a picture of Chekhov, we also learn about artistic
life in pre-Revolutionary Russia with colourful characters galore including
Chekhov's actress wife, Olga Knipper, the creator of so many of his
key parts; and the Moscow Art Theatre with its founders, Stanislavsky,
with whom Chekhov had a love-hate relationship, and Nemirovich-Danchenko.
The Twentieth Century equivalent to Stanislavsky, Yuri Lyubimov also
gets an affectionate portrait, after Pennington works with him and then,
as his love for all things Russian develops, periodically crosses the
legendary director's path.
The balance of the book works well because once you feel that you have
got underneath the skin of the Russian, you are able to see how all
of the biographer's research fits together in a memorable monologue.
Pennington's identification with his subject is so great that anybody
seeing the front cover of this book might well take some time to decide
whether the subject photographed is the real thing or the actor. Are
You There, Crocodile? is worth the investment because it works on
so many levels, as biography, as travel journal, as literary analysis,
as actor's memoir and as playscript.
Philip Fisher
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