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"Fortune's
Fool"
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t
h e a t r e
Fortune's Fool
The notes below were produced by the Chichester
Festival Theatre staff for the 1996 production of "Fortune's
Fool." I have placed them in the Bates Archive because the
information is so interesting and useful for anyone who has seen,
or is planning to see, the play. KMR,
1 September 02
Note on the Adaptation
Mike Poulton
 FOR
YEARS people, English and Russian, have been saying to me: "There's
a wonderful play by Turgenev called "Impecuniousness."
My stock response was always "Does it live up to the promise
of its title?
 Last year a friend,
working on the Chichester production of "Hadrian VII,"
found in a bookshop in Malvern the English translation of a Turgenev
play under the title "A Poor Gentleman," which he thought
I would like for my birthday. He was right. Turgenev has always
been favourite reading for me. I once started to adapt "Sketches
From a Hunter's Album" for the radio but never finished
it as the minute I put down one Turgenev I have to pick up another
and then another. Then the problem becomes one of stopping reading
and starting writing.
Because of the Chichester
connection I began to read "Poor Gentleman" with the
idea of the Festival Theatre at the back of my mind. The play
and the appropriate space must have fused together. The next
move was to ask friends at Oxford to track down the original.
They all started reading it too. "It starts off like Gogol
and it ends up like Ostrovsky," said one. "It's like
early Chekhov in places," said another. I was by this stage
becoming very excited by the play though adapting it successfully,
I realised, would not be easy. While it does have echoes of Gogol,
Ostrovsky and Chekhov it is absolutely Turgenev and Turgenev
is notoriously difficult to get right for a British audience.
Many years ago the
Professor of Russian at Oxford went to a production of Turgenev's
"A Month in the Country" at a provincial theatre. On
his return he bumped into the librarian of the Taylor Institute
-- Oxford's Library of Eastern European Languages.
"How did you
enjoy 'A Month in the Country'?" asked the librarian.
"A fortnight
would have been long enough," replied the professor.
Turgenev's best known
play, uncut, and played at a pace demanded by its style would
probably run for about five hours and test the powers of endurance
of even the most ardent of his admirers. The truth is its a novel
whose narrator must have gone on holiday. Perhaps Turgenev grew
tired of writing "he said", "she said", all
the time. But in recent years fine adaptations of "A Month
in the Country" have unlocked its dramatic method and delighted
its audiences.
- add
a bit of Jacobi -
A different set of problems faces would-be adapters of his
shorter plays. I say 'adapters' without apology as those who
seek to provide 'straight' translations face, in Russian plays
of this period, the biggest problem of all. The problem is that
we have the words but we know little of the style in which the
lines were delivered. In a sense it's all Greek to a modern audience.
In fact one may use the example of Greek Tragedy to illustrate
the problem. A director looking for the first time at a work
by Euripides has the text -- the libretto -- but nothing of the
music or the choreography essential to the effect of the original
production. The majority of Turgenev's stage works are raw texts.
They promise much but they don't give up their secrets easily.
We are dealing with a body of work which, in the main, has never
been seen in Britain.
An actor playing Hamlet,
for example, can cheat a bit. He's probably seen the play five
or six times and he can -- if he's getting desperate -- add a
bit of Jacobi and a bit of Olivier and a bit of Ralph Fiennes
to the rich stew of his creative juices. Not so for an actor
playing a Turgenev role. With the exception of "A Month
in the Country" the record is blank all the way back to
the 1850s. There is, of course, no sound record and the visual
remains are slight. The few photographs that exist of early Russian
performances of plays of the last half of the nineteenth century
suggest that the style must have been close to performances in
silent films. So that's no help. the challenge facing an adapter,
the director, and the company playing the text is to try to discover
a modern equivalent of the style that made the originals so successful.
The excitement is in sharing the process of discovery.
There are clues. We
know that Chekhov hated the stock characters who littered the
Russian stage -- comic generals, blustering government officials,
and idiotic serfs -- because the moment they made an entrance
the audience knew exactly the sort of stage business and baggage
they would bring with them. But without the business and baggage
one is left, particularly in lesser works of the period, with
very few starting points. While it is clear from his writing
that Turgenev must have shared Chekhov's opinion it is unclear
from his texts alone how he improved matters. Or rather how his
interpreters improved matters, for Turgenev spent much of his
time abroad and missed most of his own first nights.
Chekhov's affection
for Turgenev provides another clue. We know that he admired,
and felt a great warmth for the characters Turgenev drew, his
ability to create genuine dramatic tension out of seemingly ordinary
situations, and his genius for recreating the delights and horrors
of everyday Russian life in a few phrases or sentences. Many
of Chekhov's best characters are prefigured in the plays and
stories of Turgenev. The clue here, left for adapter and actors,
is that the best way to approach Turgenev may be to work back
through Chekhov.
- unworkable
on a modern stage -
 The
only published translation of "Fortune's Fool" appeared
as "A Poor Gentleman" in the early thirties. It was
made by that excellent translator, best known for her versions
of Chekhov, Constance Garnet. It's a good and faithful work,
has been out of print for many years, and is in my opinion and
for reasons I have suggested above, unworkable on a modern stage.
I made good use of it when producing my own adaptation, together
with invaluable advice and direction from Russian speaking friends
and scholars.
There are difficulties
in this game of rediscovering the style of a lost work. But some
things work to our advantage. Turgenev is a master of conversational
technique. He reads as if he's talking to you. We've lost the
art and the habit of reading aloud to each other -- except through
radio or talking books -- but many of Turgenev's plays and all
his novels would have been read in groups during long Russian
winters. Distinctions blur between novels and plays, and dialogue
-- in whatever form it is presented -- is direct and believable.
(Anybody who thinks this is true of all novelists should have
a go at adapting Henry James.) Advances in modern theatrical
technique work strongly in our favour too. One of the difficulties
with this particular play is that the first act is large -- some
have used the word 'operatic.' The second act is intimate and
enclosed. a modern stage like Chichester's is infinitely flexible.
It can be an opera stage when you need it to be, or turn into
a drawing room when you need it to do that. Another plus is the
distance between us and a set of original productions about which
we know practically nothing. The advantage here is that with
no precedents the director and actors have a free hand. They
can use all their skills and experience to make what is to all
intents and purposes a new play for today's audiences.
When I finished the first draft of the play I showed it to
another friend who knows a thing or two about theatre. "What
do you think of this, then?" I said. "Is it Gogol,
Ostrovsky, or Chekhov?"
When he'd read it
he phoned me up. "It's Alan Bates," he said. |||
Life on the Estate
Turgenev's home
"This little serf-world, this miniature state, teeming
with countless human beings supported by it, all gossiping, whispering,
intriguing. Think only of the innumerable tales, traditions and
superstitions, the fears and the petty passions." -Polonsky
AT THE TIME of writing "The Parasite" ("Fortune's
Fool"), Russia was a rural state with about 96% of its population
living on the countryside. The peasantry made up 83% of Russia's
total population, whereas the gentry made up 1.1%. The imbalance
of wealth was huge, and the gentry owned the personal liberty
of 50.7% of the peasant population. These serfs were bound to
the landlord who owned them.
The peasant paid most
of the taxes, produced the grain which was Russia's most valuable
export, produced the food which the Russians ate, and yet had
practically no rights.
Serfs were dominated
by three forces: the family, the mir (collective unit of peasants
on a given estate) and, most importantly, the noble of the estate
to whom they belonged. Land was distributed to the serfs by the
landowner, divided inefficiently into strips. The serf could
either pay the landowner rent and sell his strip for cash crop,
or he could pay the landowner in labour.
At any time, a landowner
could revoke some or all of a serf's rights. He could take serfs
into domestic service at will, or indeed ask almost anything
else of them. The noble could determine, for example, when and
to whom his serfs would marry.
However, at the time,
serfdom was beginning to fail as an economic, social and political
structure.
 Most relevant for "Fortune's
Fool" is the precarious economic position of a significant
percentage of landowners. By 1843, for example, more than 54%
of noble-owned lands were mortgaged to different state institutions.
Many estates were also encumbered by private debts. The low productivity
and the constant subdivision of estates because of Russian inheritance
laws resulted in nearly half the Russian nobility having neither
land nor serfs on the eve of emancipation in the middle of the
century. Most surviving households of the period had a number
of impoverished dependent relatives, friends, hangers-on. Members
of the same class tend to stick together. A gentleman left to
starve would reflect badly on his peers. Kuzovkin is a well-known
type, as is Waffles in "Uncle Vanya."
The estates that Olga
and Pavel Yeletsky have inherited are like a small town or a
large village. The effect of their arrival on Yegor and the others
is something akin to a change in local government. It is a feeling
of a new regime coming to power, rather than just a domestic
homecoming, which sets the tone for the opening of the play.
Everybody feels that they will have to deliver up their accounts,
and this goes for Kuzovkin as much as it does for Yegor and Praskovya
Ivanova. |||
The Russian Meal
THE RUSSIAN WORD for hospitality is Khlebosol'stv, literally
translated as 'regaling with bread and salt'. The word can be
broken down into two, Khleb which means bread and sol which means
salt. To offer one's bread is to honour one's guest.
In Tsarist Russia
it was the custom to present the guest with a loaf of freshly
baked rye or white bread. The loaf would be decorated with cut-out
dough shapes. This loaf, known as the Karavai, often grew to
extreme proportions. a wooden dish of salt was offered alongside
the bread. Sometimes the salt dish was even placed in a special
indentation in the centre of the loaf. As soon as the guest appeared,
the karavai was brought to the table, and the guest cut the first
slice, dipping it into the salt saying, 'khleb da sol!'
A modern example of Khlebosol'stv in an American
Ukrainian household
In liberal households,
guests were received in a European fashion. They met in the drawing
room before moving onto another chamber to eat. The food was
usually Zakusi, an elaborate selection of hors d'oeuvres. This
way of eating suited the Russian way of life. Due to bad weather
and poor roads, guests were often late. Zakusi would be prepared
for dining at any time.
Thus it would not
have seemed impolite for the gentlemen in "Fortune's Fool"
to begin dining in the absence of Olga, who has gone to change
out of her travelling clothes. She would join the meal (and is
indeed about to at the end of Act One) when she was ready, without
fear of missing courses.
It is said in Russia,
that if you want to be well fed, then sit next to the hostess,
and if you want to get drunk, then sit next to the host. The
rules of hospitality say that the host should be compulsive about
refilling the glass of his guest, and each time the glass is
refilled, a new toast should be raised. It is thought that a
guest's foolish smile and lethargic gait at the end of the evening
indicate to his hosts that they have served him well. In this
sense Tropatchov's actions are not ungentlemanly, although his
motives certainly are. |||
Fool's Gold
Arthur Penn Stages a Lost Russian Classic
VOGUE, April 2002, FANFAIR
Fortune Tellers: Frank Langella, Arthur Penn, and Alan
Bates,
photographed for Vogue by Firooz Zahedi.
IF THERE WERE a Guinness Book of Theatre Records, Fortune's
Fool would surely merit an entry -- it took 148 years to
arrive at its theatrical birth! Written in 1848 by the great
Russian novelist, poet, and playwright Ivan Turgenev, the satire
lay dormant until, in 1996, it was adapted for the [Chichester]
Festival Theatre in England and hailed as the most beloved of
phenomena, a "lost masterpiece."
On April 2 it will
commence its Broadway life in a new production at the Music Box
Theatre, bolstered by two brilliant actors in the lead roles,
Alan Bates (who starred in the British production) and Frank
Langella, and directed by Arthur Penn -- a trio of Tony winners.
(Ironically, early in his career, Langella played the lead role
in Mel Brooks's adaptation of The Twelve Chairs, another Russian
comedy that deserves to be exhumed.)
Fortune's Fool,
which has been said to be full of mischief and poignancy, is
set on a rather neglected country estate belonging to a newly
married young woman and her husband, a man of consequence. The
house is inhabited by an aging nobleman (Alan Bates) who was
cheated out of his fortune many years before and now fears imminent
eviction.
At a celebratory dinner,
a wealthy neighbor goads the poor man into overdrinking in an
effort to make him look foolish, but the moment belongs to the
consummate Alan Bates, and it turns out to be the decisive moment
of the play. It took a century and a half to arrive here, but
arrive it has. Turgenev would certainly be delighted. |||
- Richard Merkin
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