Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe NEW YORK, March 6 (UPI) -- During the current visit of London's Donmar Warehouse production of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, some of the Russian playwright's devotees have become aware that the drama is not being played by the book. It has a new English translation by Brian Friel, the eminent Irish playwright, who is credited in the program with "adapting" the play. This often means that the language has been modernized for contemporary audiences, but Friel has done more than that and the audience is not warned. Advertisement He has written in his own lines and eliminated some of Chekhov's and even enlarged one of the roles in the play! Editing a play -- often in the interest of shortening it -- is common practice, probably exercised more on William Shakespeare's works than those of any other playwright. And there are bad translations as well as good. But adding language? That is a reprehensible literary offense with serious ethical implications. Advertisement It is as though Friel is saying that Chekhov's classic about absurd and tragically wasted Russian lives lived out on a country estate is not quite good enough for today's audiences and could do with some "improving." If this has been done to widen Chekhov's appeal, Friel has acted arrogantly and condescendingly. Taking this approach to works by Chekhov and other playwrights of the past should be roundly condemned, and producers and directors should avoid staging such "adaptations" at all costs. Let's have our theater as it was originally conceived without any tampering with the language or additions to the dialogue in the Frielian sense of "improving" Chekhov by making his characters wittier or more complex. Taking a purist point of view is not to take a narrow point of view in this case. Let's compare some of Friel's translation of "Uncle Vanya" with that of the more generally used translation by Ann Dunnigan to get some idea of the grossness of totally uncalled-for emendations in this Sam Mendes staging of the play with Simon Russell Beale in the title role. When Dr. Astrov, the rural physician and intimate of the Serebryakov family, says farewell to Yelena, the bored femme fatale visiting the estate, Friel has him say: "You are a very complicated woman," whereas the accepted translation is, "You seem to be a good, sincere person." Quite a difference in meaning! Advertisement Yelena, a city person, has noted earlier that country people seem to do "nothing but eat, drink, and sleep," but Friel has her saying: "Picking gooseberries is an occasion. A new roof on the granary is an event. The arrival of the thresher -- good God, that is a Greek drama!" Obviously Frield just couldn't resist embroidering on a simple observation! Even more egregious is his pruning of the repeated phrase "we shall rest" numerous times from the long, poetically cadenced lament of Sonya, the play's unappreciated spinster, when she tells her Uncle Vanya that, although neither of them have known joy: "We shall rest. We shall hear the angels; shall see the sky all dressed in diamonds; we shall see all the world's evil and all our suffering drown in that mercy that will fill the Earth; and our life will become as quiet and gentle and sweet as a caress." Equally inexplicable is Friel's expansion of the cameo role of Ilya Telegin, a peripheral character on the estate, into a comic character whose fascination with all things German and his family weakness of sweating becomes an anticipated conversational gambit that draws increasing laughter from the audience. Germans and perspiration are never mentioned by Chekhov's Telegin. Advertisement Friel also has given lines to Vanya, a self-pitying ne'er-do-well, that change the play's emphasis on the tragedy of his life, making him more of a witty Teddy bear character to fit actor Beale's hefty build. When old Prof. Serebryakov shows up with his young wife, Yelena, to visit his bumpkin relatives, he greets them dismissively and goes right to his room, saying: "Research calls, I'm afraid." Vanya asks Astrov in words Chekhov never wrote: "I didn't hear research call, did you?" Even the staging of the play in a dining room opening completely onto a vista of farm meadows robs the play of the claustrophobic atmosphere Chekhov created within the walls of the Serebryakov manor, so that it rings true when one of the characters says, "Open a window... It's stifling." That can't be blamed on Friel, but it is symptomatic of an approach to a stage classic that is insensitive to the literary intent of the playwright.
