ABSTRACT
Michael Chekhov’s work at Dartington Hall in Devon during the 1930s left very little impression on theatre practices in Britain and, as Jerri Daboo has pointed out, his name was barely mentioned for more than fifty years (2012: 74). As far as the general public were concerned, and even the vast majority of theatre practitioners and academics, it was as if this hugely talented former member of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) had never even visited the UK, let alone established an experimental theatre studio in the English countryside. This disappearance was not the result of a deliberate policy to erase Chekhov’s work from the official record, as was the case in the Soviet Union, but an accident of historical circumstances. In 1936, two new theatre studios opened in England: the Chekhov Theatre Studio
in Devon, under the leadership of Michael Chekhov, and the London Theatre Studio in London, under the leadership of Michel Saint-Denis. Both Chekhov and Saint-Denis were directly involved with major figures in the re-vitalization of the practices of theatre in general and of the art of the actor in particular: Chekhov with Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov; Saint-Denis with Copeau. Successful and experienced actor-directors, Chekhov and Saint-Denis each sought to go beyond the work of their masters and develop their own methods. Both studios were also to have their work curtailed by the events leading to the outbreak of WWII, and this would seem to suggest that it would be simple enough to consider the relative success of each venture and compare the effectiveness of each practitioner’s methods. Whilst comparing the two projects can provide some useful insights, there are a number of difficulties, which mean that any evaluation requires significant qualification. Whilst Chekhov moved his studio to Ridgefield in Connecticut and spent the rest
of his life working in the USA, Saint-Denis returned to England in 1940 and, at the end of the war, was able to continue his work in London. Saint-Denis was invited to direct Oedipus Rex at the Old Vic in 1945 and then became the director of the Old Vic Theatre Centre from 1947-52 and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon from 1962-65 (Chekhov died in 1955). Daboo (2012) is undoubtedly correct that Saint-Denis left a much more durable legacy in the UK than Chekhov, but it is by no means clear that this would have been the case if the former’s involvement with the British theatre had ended in 1938.
