AUTANT-MATHIEU, Marie-Christine, and MEERZON, Yana. eds. (2017). The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov. Abingdon & New York : Routledge. Illustrations. Tables. Chronology. Index. v-xxi, 431 pp.

This paperback edition of a book first published in 2015 and arising from an international conference held in Paris in 2007, consists of four sections and twenty-five essays devoted to the work of Michael Chekhov, the actor, director and theorist – nephew of the famous dramatist and short story writer, Anton Chekhov. When Michael Chekhov died of heart-related problems in Hollywood at the age of 64 on 30th September 1955, he had been absent from his Russian homeland for twenty-seven years during which time he had lived and worked as actor, director and teacher in Germany, France, Latvia, Lithuania, England and the U.S.A. Prior to his departure in 1928 from what was then the Soviet Union, Chekhov’s career as an actor had begun at the Moscow Art Theatre, where he was influenced by the teaching of Stanislavsky, who directed him in productions of Twelfth Night and The Government Inspector [as Malvolio and Khlestakov]. Having joined the Art Theatre’s First Studio, Chekhov came under the tutelage of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, in some of whose productions he acted, before establishing his own studio and then assuming control of the Second Moscow Art Theatre [MAT2 as the First Studio came to be known]. Here, he acted and directed between 1922 and 1928, performing a series of important roles, the most famous of which was as Hamlet. Although heavily influenced by both Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov, it was his friendship with the novelist Andrei Bely, whose Petersburg (Peterburg) he had dramatised and performed in at MAT2, that exercised the greatest influence on Chekhov’s subsequent career. Bely’s anthroposophical views, which Chekhov came to share, had been gleaned from the writings of Rudolf Steiner, whose lectures at Dornach Bely had attended and whose acting theories were based on the psycho-physical basis of eurythmy, the notion of ‘cosmic radiation’, and the attainment of a ‘Higher Self’. This essentially religious, even mystical, approach to the art of theatre and its messianic goal of a Theatre of the Future, which Chekhov also espoused, proved unacceptable to a Soviet society, the philosophical basis of which was dialectical materialism and whose artistic credo, formulated in the 1930s, was a prescriptive socialist realism. Chekhov, encountering opposition both from within his own theatre and from external political sources, felt he had no option but to continue his work abroad. This led to permanent exile from the country of his birth where, under Stalin, he became a ‘non-person’ eliminated from the historical record until his rehabilitation, first during ‘the thaw’ in East-West relations and subsequently during the post-Soviet period. The history of early modern, post-medieval theatre in Western Europe had essentially been of a secular nature unlike, for example, the theatre of Ancient Greece where religious mythology and theatre were closely linked and, in common with the theatre forms of Asia and the Far East, the means of performance were highly stylised. The dominant performative mode in post-Renaissance European theatre was largely realistic and text-based, culminating in true-to-life naturalism in the 19th century. Towards the end of the 19th century, dissatisfaction with theatrical naturalism and its reductionist perspectives, allied with a rejection of neo-Darwinian versions of human evolution and Marxist theories of historical materialism, as well as Benthamite utilitarianism and the industrial commodification of everyday life led, in the arts, to the embrace of spiritual alternatives to a world increasingly seen to be dominated by mechanical production and scientific theories of cause and effect. Another sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo, especially as this affected the theatre, was the feeling of inferiority felt by serious practitioners such as Stanislavsky, whenever the art of theatrical performance …