rise to its feet. In the context of the play, the departure of the soldiers
from their small town is, to say the very least, not a cause for celebration
in the eyes of Olga, Masha and Irina; it isn’t meant to express the hope that
an occupying military force will soon be on the way out. This very fact,
however–that a line may be accidentally relevant and used to promote
the group expression of a political sentiment–strikes me as an important
part of the political power of theatre. It isn’t just the intentions of the
author in the carefully chosen words of the play text; nor is it the well-
rehearsed scenes of the company. It’s a gathering of people, often of
strangers, drawn together and given the opportunity to think and to
express themselves.^25
The Chekhov anecdote also indicates two further features of theatrical
performances that, in this context, we ought not to forget. Thefirst is
that political theatre needn’t come from a new play–newly written,
directly addressed to present political concerns. Churchill’s play, of
course, was all of those things; but the performance ofThree Sisterswas
permitted precisely because Chekhov plays were considered part of a lit-
erary canon, thought to be in some way safe or approved by the Soviets.
Safe, classic plays can turn into something political in virtue of the live
performance. Indeed, a number of authoritarian governments have shown
themselves reluctant to be seen to ban (say) Shakespeare or Chekhov,
because that would make them seem barbaric; it’s much easier to exclude
or censor the work of living artists. The second point is that, compared
with written, published literature (including, of course, play texts), thea-
trical performances are much harder to censor. One reason for this is that
reading a text–if indeed there is one–gives only a partial sense of what
a particular performance would be like. Puns, for example, are particu-
larly easy to miss. According to one anecdote, a clown called Durov,
performing in 1907, trained a pig to fetch a helmet (German:Helm). As
the pig fetched the helmet, Durov would use ventriloquism to make the
pig say‘I want helmet’ (‘Ich will Helm’); because, in German,‘I want
helmet’sounds exactly like‘I [am] Wilhelm’, audiences who began by
laughing at a pig chasing a helmet suddenly found themselves laughing
at calling the Kaiser a pig. Would a censor, looking at a text, have been
able to pick this up?^26 Generally, of course, the same text can produce an
infinite variety of performances. It’s also extremely difficult to tell, just
from reading it, how an audience might respond to a particular line (‘the
army is leaving’). When you add in effects of lighting, sound, vocal
emphasis and so on, the text becomes a pretty poor guide to a performance.
Elsom puts this nicely in his discussion of Cold War censorship:‘a line
which looked innocent when read by the censors in Moscow took on a
different meaning when played against a lighting change which turned
the set blood red.’^27 Even sending a censor to a dress rehearsal of every
176 From the Stage to the World