orted.

A PLAY OF TCHEHKOFF'S

[_8 June '11_]

At last, thanks to the Stage Society, we have had a good representative
play of Anton Tchehkoff on the London stage. Needless to say, Tchehkoff
was done in the provinces long ago. "The Cherry Orchard," I have been
told, is Tchehkoff's dramatic masterpiece, and I can well believe it. But
it is a dangerous thing to present foreign masterpieces to a West End
audience, and the directors of the Stage Society discovered, or
rediscovered, this fact on Sunday night last. The reception of "The Cherry
Orchard" was something like what the reception of Ibsen's plays used to be
twenty years ago. It was scarcely even a mixed reception. There could be
no mistake about the failure of the play to please the vast majority of
the members of the Society. At the end of the second act signs of
disapproval were very manifest indeed, and the exodus from the theatre
began. A competent authority informed me that at the end of the third act
half the audience had departed; but in the narrative fever of the moment
the competent authority may have slightly exaggerated. Certain it is that
multitudes preferred Aldwych and the restaurant concerts, or even their
own homes, to Tchehkoff's play. And as the evening was the Sabbath you may
judge the extreme degree of their detestation of the play.

* * * * *

A director of the Stage Society said to me on the Monday: "If our people
won't stand it, it has no chance, because we have the pick here." I didn't
contradict him, but I by no means agreed that he had the pick there. The
managing committee of the Society is a very enlightened body; but the mass
of the members is just as stupid as any other mass. Its virtue is that it
pays subscriptions, thus enabling the committee to make experiments and to
place before the forty or fifty persons in London who really can judge a
play the sort of play which is worthy of curiosity.

* * * * *

In spite of the antipathy which is aroused, "The Cherry Orchard" is quite
inoffensive. For example, there is nothing in it to which the Censor could
possibly object. It does not deal specially with sex. It presents an
average picture of Russian society. But it presents the picture with such
exact, uncompromising truthfulness that the members of the Stage Society
mistook nearly all the portraits for caricatures, and tedious
caricatures. In naturalism the play i