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Amfiteater, letn. 12, št. 1, 2024
UDK 82.09-211:792.02
792.02:82.09-211
DOI 10.51937/Amfiteater-2024-1/42-75

Abstract
When critics discuss the question of the canonisation of comedy, they usually base their
arguments on analyses of successful plays. However, it might be just as productive, and
perhaps even more interesting, to examine comedies that failed, especially those written
by well-respected authors. The author focuses in this paper on three plays from roughly
the same historical period that all experienced a calamitous original performance and
either never managed to recover fully from this failure or have since not been treated
as comedies.
The three plays that he explores in more detail are Gustave Flaubert’s The Candidate
(Le Candidat, 1874), Henry James’s Guy Domville (1894) and Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull
(Ча́
Ча́ йка, 1895). Even though these three plays were written by well-known writers of their
own time, who are still considered hugely influential today, the opening-night audiences
did not respond to them in the manner that their authors had hoped. This response
is particularly surprising since both Flaubert and Chekhov otherwise wrote several very
amusing texts. To determine why this happened, the author compares the selected
plays to several other works: Carl Sternheim’s adaptation of Flaubert’s comedy, Oscar
Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance and two of Chekhov’s early farces. The results of these
comparisons suggest that the plays most likely failed as comedies because of their flawed
relationship between reason and unreason, regularly making them too negative to serve
as a source of enjoyment.

Keywords: comedy, failure, dialectics, reason and unreason, Flaubert, James, Wilde
Jure Gantar holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Ljubljana and a PhD in
drama from the University of Toronto. Since 1992, he has taught at Dalhousie University
as a professor at the Fountain School of Performing Arts. He has published four books –
Dramaturgija in smeh (Dramaturgy and Laughter, 1993), The Pleasure of Fools (2005), The
Evolution of Wilde’s Wit (2015), and Eseji o komediji (Essays on Comedy, 2022) – as well
as more than a hundred articles and other publications on the theory of drama, comedy,
laughter, wit and contemporary theatre.
Jure.Gantar@dal.ca

The Anatomy of Failure
Jure Gantar
Fountain School of Performing Arts, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

Failure as a Methodological Starting Point
Comedies fail for a variety of reasons. Some of these are entirely trivial. Terence’s
The Mother-in-Law (Hecyra), for example, failed once because the audience was
distracted by the “talk of a boxing match, and … a tightrope-walker” and then the
second time because the performance was interrupted by “a show of gladiators” (62).
Georg Büchner’s Leonce and Lena (Leonce und Lena), on the other hand, was rejected
because the author missed the submission deadline of a playwriting competition.
When he realised the manuscript was returned unopened, he did not try to offer the
script to anyone else (Hilton 89). As a result, the play only premièred in 1895, almost
sixty years after Büchner’s death.
Comedies often fail because they are poorly performed. When actors lack talent
and a sense of humour, no amount of playwriting magic can protect them from the
audience’s disapproval. One such famous instance is the première of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s The Rivals on 17 January 1775, in which John Lee’s stereotypical portrayal
of the stage Irishman Sir Lucius O’Trigger was so bad that he was replaced with
another actor after the second night (1: 40–41).

Sometimes, comedies are spurned because they are ahead of their time. The main
reason why Carlo Goldoni’s The Amiable Old Man (Il Vecchio Bizzarro) was met with
“nothing but hisses” (Goldoni, Memoirs 308) is that the likeable lover in the play is
an elderly man and not a handsome youth. Both Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu (Ubu Roi)
and John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World caused riots when they
were first staged because the spectators found the plays crude and immoral (compare
Béhar 73 and Saddlemyer xxi). In all three cases, the audiences’ tastes changed
subsequently, and the plays not only survived the disastrous opening nights but have,
over time, become cornerstones of comic repertoires in their countries.
Most commonly, however, comedies fail because they are badly written; that is, their
plots are implausible, their characters formulaic, and their dialogue stilted. Such
comedies flop deservedly and irrevocably and are usually erased from the theatre’s

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collective memory. As appropriate as this fate seems, it unfortunately also means that
no one can learn from their mistakes and that future generations of playwrights may
end up repeating them. The one exception from this practice is unsuccessful comedies
by well-known authors who know how to create psychologically sound characters,
structure tight storylines and write elegant lines. These plays are ideally positioned to
provide us with an unexpected insight into the inner mechanisms of the genre. They
are especially useful in trying to explain what enables a comedy to survive.

Therefore, in this paper, I focus on three plays from roughly the same historical period
that all experienced a calamitous original performance and either never managed to
recover fully from this failure or, at least since, have not been treated as comedies.
Gustave Flaubert’s The Candidate (Le Candidat), Henry James’s Guy Domville and
Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (Ча́йка) were all staged when their authors were
already well respected. However, the opening-night audiences did not respond to
their plays in the manner that one might have expected. This response is particularly
surprising since both Flaubert and Chekhov otherwise wrote several very amusing
texts. To determine why this happened, I compare the selected plays to several other
works: Carl Sternheim’s adaptation of Flaubert’s comedy, Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of
No Importance and two of Chekhov’s early farces. The results of these comparisons
suggest that the plays most likely failed as comedies because of their flawed
relationship between reason and unreason, regularly making them too negative to
serve as a source of enjoyment.

Flaubert’s Le Candidat and Sternheim’s Der Kandidat
When The Candidate premièred on 11 March 1874, Flaubert was widely considered
his generation’s most important French novelist (see Lottman 140–41). Though his
achievements were never recognised with a seat in the Académie Française, the
notoriety of Madame Bovary ensured that he was known around Europe. The fact that
his best-known novel was almost twenty years old at that time should not be taken
as an indication that Flaubert’s talent was on the wane. On the contrary, his second
realist masterpiece, the autobiographical novel Sentimental Education (L’Éducation
sentimentale), appeared just five years before The Candidate and further affirmed his
influence in the new literary movement.
The Candidate may have been rushed a bit – Flaubert wrote his comedy in two months
– but it was staged at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, a well-regarded house, and produced
by the experienced impresario Carvalho, who gained his fame as the manager who
staged Alexandre Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias). While
Flaubert was not a seasoned playwright, the company was aware of his standing as a

literary man and approached his words with care and respect.

And yet, the opening night was an unmitigated disaster. Flaubert himself attributed
at least part of the blame for the fiasco to an unsophisticated audience who came
to the Théâtre du Vaudeville expecting a light-hearted farce rather than a biting
satire. “Besides, it has to be said that the audience was detestable,” he complained
in a letter to George Sand, “all fops and stockbrokers who had no understanding of
what words mean” (Flaubert, Letters 206). But this may not have been entirely true.
In his Journal, Flaubert’s friend Edmond de Goncourt reports a different atmosphere
in the theatre. He suggests that the spectators were, in principle, supportive and were
looking forward to hearing Flaubert’s fiery rhetoric and uncompromising depiction of
contemporary society. When this did not happen, “the disappointment of the audience
took its revenge in a sort of bantering whisper, a smiling mockery of the whole sorry
business” (Goncourt 135).
The opening-night spectators were not the only ones who could not relate to the
selfish characters; the well-disposed critics also struggled with Flaubert’s bleak
vision of democracy. Émile Zola was just about the only author who appreciated the
play. Virtually everyone else dismissed it. Paul de Saint-Victor, for instance, thought
it “presented marionettes rather than people”; at the same time, both Auguste Vitu
and Sand noted the absence of any sympathetic and relatable characters who would
grab the audience’s interest (Brown 496–97). Flaubert may have tried to convince
himself that the muttering on the first evening was an anomaly, but when he saw that
the audience responded in the same manner on the second evening, he was sensible
enough to ask that the play be taken off the repertoire (see Lottman 269).

The plot of The Candidate revolves around a wealthy provincial banker, Rousselin,
who decides to run for a member of parliament. He is mostly interested in the social
prestige offered by the position and does not have a clearly defined political agenda.
His campaign is further complicated by the fact that the two young men vying
for the attention of his daughter Louise belong to opposite sides of the social and
political spectrum: one is the middle-class factory manager Murel, and the other is
the clueless young aristocrat Onésime. While Lousie prefers the former, by the end
of the play, Rousselin forces her to accept the latter to secure the farmers’ votes that
the Viscount’s landlord father can deliver. This does not prevent him, however, from
exploiting the services of Murel, who is particularly useful for his connection with
the local journalist Julien Duprat. In a very Molièresque ending to the play, Rousselin
not only sacrifices his daughter for his political goals but also more or less pushes his
wife into an affair with Julien, who, in turn, provides him with positive press coverage.
Rousselin wins the elections but is entirely alone at the end of the play.

The Candidate certainly does not lack dramaturgical ambition. Unlike Victorien

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Sardou’s Rabagas, a hugely popular political comedy from the same era that also
features a corrupt journalist, Flaubert is not content with staying within the confines
of the genre. Instead, he bravely experiments and tries to expand the format. The
ending of his play, for instance, is far from happy for anyone, including for Rousselin.
The young lovers remain apart, the arranged marriage succeeds, and the husband is
cuckolded. In general, the tone of the play is cynical and pessimistic.

But these innovations are not on their own the most important reason for The
Candidate’s failure. Let us not forget that comedy as a theatrical event requires
novelty and invention. This means that, in principle, a play that consciously defies
what Hans Robert Jauß calls “the horizon of expectations” (Toward an Aesthetic
22 ff ) should have a greater chance of survival. Yet Flaubert’s play failed not only
in its original production but also in its 1910 revival, staged by another great
director, André Antoine, whose run also lasted just one night (Flaubert 518). Why
is this the case? The best answer to this question can be found in a comparison
of Flaubert’s comedy with its German adaptation, Der Kandidat, written in 1914
by Carl Sternheim. Because Sternheim succeeded where Flaubert did not – his
adaptation was popular and even today remains on the repertoires of German
theatres – an analysis of the differences between the two versions should at least
point us to a possible explanation.
Sternheim’s adaptation retains the basic dramatic structure of Flaubert’s comedy. He
moves the storyline into his own time and changes the characters’ names, but the
sequence of the events remains largely untouched. While only one figure has been cut
from Flaubert’s dramatis personae (the maid Félicité), several of his characters lose
their narrative significance in the adaptation. Viscount Onésime’s replacement, the
comparably pompous Graf Achim Rheydt, for example, barely appears in Sternheim’s
version and is only peripherally involved in the plot, serving mostly as a paper rival to
his bourgeois opponent Grübel (Murel in Flaubert’s original). In addition to this, the
dialogue in Sternheim’s play is substantially faster and more economical. Though Der
Kandidat faithfully retains virtually all the information from Le Candidat – even the
jokes are often recycled – Sternheim’s dialogue only keeps those lines that advance the
action and omits most of those that are used to flesh out the characters’ personalities.
Only in the last two acts does Sternheim depart more radically from Flaubert’s original.
And it is these changes that probably best demonstrate why Flaubert’s comedy failed
and Sternheim’s survived. The first major change is in the Murel-Rousselin (or GrübelRussek) subplot. In Flaubert’s play, Murel, who initially appears to be the shrewdest
of the characters, is oblivious to Rousselin’s manipulations and believes that the
aspiring politician will let him marry his daughter. In Act Four, for example, we can
witness the following conversation:

MUREL. Monsieur Rousselin, it seems to me you might listen to my request!

ROUSSELIN. No! No! Don’t worry me now! You would do better to go and look after your
workmen. Even in the short time that remains, they might—
MUREL. But I brought Dodart here expressly that he might explain my affairs to you!
ROUSSELIN. Go to your workmen now, I say! We can talk of your affairs later.
MUREL. You consent, then—it is certain?

ROUSSELIN. Yes, but don’t lose any more time!

MUREL. [joyfully]: Ah! You may count on me! Why, I ought to give them an increase in wages
out of my own pocket! [Exit]. 				

(Flaubert, 8: 102–103)

Rousselin is very obviously only interested in securing the votes in this scene, and
Murel only in securing his permission to marry Louise. When that is given, no matter
how casually, Murel is elated and clearly has confidence in Rousselin’s promise, even
though he had repeatedly seen his prospective father-in-law lie before. Murel believes
him and exits happily, never to be seen again on the stage.

Sternheim’s Grübel is far less gullible. Though the conversation between him and Russek
is quite similar – here, too, the suitor is trying to extract a concession when the father
of his beloved is vulnerable – Grübel is more direct than Murel. Here is their exchange:
GRÜBEL. I’ve been working behind the scenes for you. Some of what you attributed to
Bach today is partially my doing. But let’s put that aside. Mr. Russek, in this moment of
destiny, when a wisp of rumour can tip the scales and destroy everything, I ask you....

RUSSEK. Don’t ask. Everything has long been decided in your favour. Such a dear friend,
such a selfless helper! Hurry to the polling station, double, multiply yourself for me! Be
like a storm, a turmoil among the undecided! (Sternheim 96)

Grübel’s hint is even more open and Russek’s acceptance is even less enthusiastic
than that in Flaubert, but the outcome of their negotiations is quite different. Later,
in an entirely new scene between Grübel and Luise that does not exist in Flaubert’s
original, Sternheim even gives the couple the opportunity to discuss their impending
engagement. “Did he give you his word? Will he keep it?” Luise asks her fiancé, who
responds, “I know him better. Don’t trust him!” (Sternheim 97). Grübel is no longer
uncharacteristically naïve and knows that the assurance he received may be worthless.
He remains intelligent and plans for every eventuality.

In the next scene, Sternheim repeats Flaubert’s most cringeworthy dialogue, in which
the father begs his daughter to sacrifice herself for his political success and marry
the ridiculous Graf Achim. Just like in the French version, in the German, too, Luise
eventually agrees. But there is a catch: unlike Flaubert, Sternheim allows the lovers
to elope rather than condemning the obedient daughter to a loveless marriage with a
brainless snob. This not only restores some of the more traditional comic feel to the

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play but also helps Grübel retain his dramatic integrity.

By empowering Grübel, Sternheim accomplishes an important task: he creates a
rational character whose main purpose is to take on the straight role in the double
act that is the foundation of all comic dramaturgy. Early critics complained about the
lack of sympathetic characters in Flaubert; what they were missing were consistently
intelligent characters who would serve as a counterpoint to the general irrationality
of the world that he depicts in his play. In other words, Flaubert’s The Candidate failed
because it is missing the interplay of reason and unreason. His entire comedy is delivered
in the same pitch, one outrageous comment following another, without a moment of
respite for logic. It should not surprise us then that the audience was so soon tired of it.
Inasmuch as it is true, as Aristotle already observed, that comedy imitates people who
are worse than us (13), it also needs people who are better than us. To enjoy aesthetic
representations of stupidity, we also need to admire the intellectual skill that exposes it.
And if this aspect of comic dialectic is missing, we are left unfulfilled.

James’s Final Attempt
Flaubert and James knew each other and met several times when James visited Paris
(Kaplan 166 ff). Just like Flaubert, James was respected, rather than loved, at the time
his Guy Domville premièred. Despite this, the actor-manager George Alexander’s faith
in James’s literary abilities was such that he commissioned the play as the opener of
the newly renovated St. James’s Theatre.

Guy Domville is set in the 1780s, and no expense was spared in the production to
ensure the historical accuracy of the costumes and the setting. A friendly group of
James’s supporters attended the opening night on 5 January 1895. He himself was too
nervous and went to see instead the hugely popular production of Oscar Wilde’s An
Ideal Husband that was playing a few streets away and had opened two days earlier.
The first act of James’s play was received politely, but, by the second, the audience
became noticeably restless. By the end of the evening, the spectators were yelling
offensive comments during some of the more heartfelt speeches, and when James
was invited in front of the curtain to be acknowledged as was the practice in the
Victorian era, he was ruthlessly jeered and booed (Edel 98). Leon Edel speculates in
his notes that James may have been collateral damage of a theatre claque that disliked
Alexander and suggests that they showed up at the opening primarily to punish the
star and not the playwright (103), but James was profoundly hurt and permanently
gave up on his dream of becoming a successful playwright.

The audience’s behaviour that evening was scandalous enough that most reviewers
mentioned it in their reports. As supportive as such influential critics as George

Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, William Archer and Arnold Bennett were of James (see
Edel 87-89), their apologies for the play’s failings could not change the fate of the
production. On subsequent evenings, the audience’s reception was much more polite,
but by that point, the damage was done. While the play managed to complete its fourweek run before it was taken off the repertoire, it was never revived again.

Guy Domville is not labelled as a “comedy” but simply as a “play”, but then so was its
contemporary competitor, Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. The very first lines of the text
indicate that James, too, is attempting to write a drawing-room play full of clever banter
and sparkling wit. The hero of the play, Guy Domville, is a member of an old English
Catholic family. He is about to enter the seminary when he is told by the conniving
Lord Devenish that, due to an unexpected death, the young prospective priest has just
become the head of the Domville family and is expected to marry a distant relative,
Mary Brasier (who happens to be Lord Devenish’s illegitimate daughter). At first, Guy
does his best to continue the family line. He adjusts to the secular life and even halfheartedly starts to court the reluctant Mary. Yet when he meets her true love, Navy
Lieutenant George Round, Guy’s better nature prevails. He ends up helping the couple
elope and then returns home. Lord Devenish, whose main objective has been all
along to correct his youthful indiscretion and marry Mrs. Domville, Mary’s widowed
mother, does not give up. He is still hoping that Guy will end up getting married and
is encouraging his affection for Mrs. Peverel. But once Guy figures out that he is once
again just a pawn in Lord Devenish’s plans, he renounces love and family, entrusts
Mrs. Peverel into the hands of his good but dull friend Frank Humber, and leaves for
the seminary, this time for good.

Just like in Flaubert’s The Candidate, in James’s Guy Domville the main structural
weakness of the play that prevents it from succeeding as a comedy is the inertness
of its dynamic. In other words, all the characters behave in a very similar manner.
Unlike in Flaubert’s comedy, they may not be worse than us in terms of their morality
– if anything, they are all so nice as to verge on bland – but they are once again all
comparably irrational. Guy may well be a man of integrity, but he is at the same time
unnecessarily impulsive and changes his mind without much thought of what his
actions will do to the others. Lord Devenish, at first, seems quite cool and calculating
but seriously misjudges the situation twice: even the most hopeful of spectators surely
know in advance that his meddling after the elopement will not achieve anything.
Even less reasonable is Mrs. Peverel. Though she admits her feelings for Guy to his
friend Frank, she ends unhappy because she cannot force herself to open her heart
to Guy himself. Lieutenant Round’s scheme is thoroughly harebrained; poor Mary
lacks the imagination needed to avoid the unwanted marriage, while Frank simply
drones on. We are missing in the play’s comic dialectic the rational counterpoint to
the unreason dominating the actions of practically all the characters.

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James understood something was wrong with his play and immediately tried to
rewrite it. The most substantial change he made before Guy Domville resumed its run
was the removal of much of the drinking scene in the second part of Act Two, during
which Lieutenant Round is trying to get Guy drunk and disclose his true intentions.
James deleted about seven pages of the text, but the changes did not significantly affect
the play’s reception. Though most critics singled out that particular passage as one of
the main weaknesses of the plot, just making Guy’s behaviour less inconsistent was
not enough to convince the actors to trust the play again. Unlike the relatively minor
tweaks that turned Sheridan’s The Rivals into a major hit and unlike Sternheim’s
changes and additions that revived Flaubert’s The Candidate, James’s dramaturgical
changes did not have the desired effect. Why not? Because the inexperienced James
did not have as sound dramatic instincts as the skilful Sternheim or because the
dynamic of his play is beyond dramaturgical redemption?
I suggest here another possibility. The main reason why no one has managed to
rewrite Guy Domville in more than a century since its unsuccessful première is that
such an “adaptation” already exists. In fact, it existed before Guy Domville itself was
even written. I am thinking here of Wilde’s 1893 play, A Woman of No Importance.

James’s relationship with Wilde was peculiar. On the one hand, he disliked the man
passionately (see James, Letters 2: 372), and on the other, he was, as his attendance
at a performance of An Ideal Husband demonstrates, inexorably drawn to Wilde’s
comedies. In many ways, then, James’s plays, and Guy Domville, in particular, can
be seen as a direct response to Wilde’s brand of comic playwriting or even as an
attempt to improve Wilde’s formula. The obvious parallels between A Woman of
No Importance and Guy Domville are hard to miss. Both plays are situated in the
countryside and populated by upper-middle class and aristocratic characters. They
both deal with similar issues – the questions of family identity and the role that
illegitimate children play in respectable society – and resolve them in a similarly
melodramatic fashion. Even the crucial prop in both plays – the gloves – is identical.
There are more characters in Wilde’s play than in James’s, but the central figures all
seem to be related. Lord Devenish and Lord Illingworth are both clever and morally
questionable. Mrs. Arbuthnot is more stubborn than Mrs. Domville, but they both
raised illegitimate children. Finally, the two young men, Gerald and Guy, are similarly
Puritanical in their outlook on life.

However, the dynamic of the relationships between these characters is fundamentally
different in the two plays. While in Guy Domville, the audience is often frustrated with
the sympathetic characters’ inability to behave rationally and make the right choices,
in A Woman of No Importance, even the most questionable acts by morally suspect
characters are presented as perfectly reasonable. We can see this very clearly in the

two scenes where the parents of the two illegitimate children discuss their future.
In Guy Domville, Lord Devenish and Mrs. Domville are very quick to give up on Mary
after they have learned that she has fled with Lieutenant Round. “Let them go!” Lord
Devenish says. When Mrs. Domville asks in horror, “Go and be married?” he responds
without much subtlety, “Go and be damned. We still have Guy! He’s as much of a
Domville as ever! He can still have heirs” (James, Guy Domville 179). He does have a
plan, but his reaction is impetuous and lacks an intellectually convincing motivation.

In contrast to this, in the comparable conversation in A Woman of No Importance,
Wilde manages to make Lord Illingworth’s similarly callous proposal almost sensible.
“According to our ridiculous English laws,” he says to his one-time mistress and
mother of his son, Mrs. Arbuthnot, “I can’t legitimise Gerald. But I can leave him my
property. Illingworth is entailed, of course, but it is a tedious barrack of a place. He
can have Ashby, which is much prettier, Harborough, which has the best shooting in
the north of England, and the house in St. James Square. What more can a gentleman
require in this world?” (Wilde 8: 178). Lord Illingworth is essentially commodifying
his responsibilities here, yet the intellectual plausibility of his suggestion is somehow
far less jarring than Lord Devenish’s stratagem. And certainly, far more amusing.

James may have objected to Wilde’s excessive use of epigrams as a means of ensuring
an effective comic dialectic (Letters 3: 514). However, if someone ever wants to have
another go at Guy Domville and rewrite it, this hypothetical adaptation will likely
end up far closer to a pastiche of Wilde’s comedies than James would have liked.
Refocusing James’s jokes will inevitably lead back to the source texts from which he
was trying to distance himself. And the best way of ensuring that the reimagined Guy
Domville works better than the originals will be to borrow shamelessly from them.

Chekhov’s Miscalculation
The world première of Chekhov’s The Seagull took place in St. Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky
Theatre on 17 October (O.S.) 1896. Chekhov was concerned about the quality of the
production team before the play opened, worrying about the actors’ inability to deal
with the new kind of text (compare Letters 263). Once the curtain rose, his worst fears
were realised. The audience was unfriendly from the very beginning. The spectators
laughed at Nina’s symbolist monologue and booed the performers. In Chekhov’s view,
the only actor in the cast who could handle his unique brand of dialogue, the delicate
Vera Komissarzhevskaya, was so affected by the audience’s disapproval that she lost her
voice and could barely continue with her lines. Chekhov was thoroughly traumatised
by this experience; he hid backstage for the final two acts and vowed never to write
for the stage again. Just like in James’s case, the continuation of the St. Petersburg run

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of The Seagull was received more generously, but the production was still taken off the
repertoire after only four days (see Callow 259).

The failure of The Seagull differs in two significant respects from the fiascos that
The Candidate and Guy Domville experienced. First, unlike these two plays, which
have been more or less forgotten since their disastrous opening nights, The Seagull
bounced back from its failure spectacularly and is now a mainstay of most repertoires.
The reason for this is, of course, the Moscow Art Theatre’s 1898 production under
the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky, which included, in addition to Stanislavsky
himself in the role of Trigorin, Chekhov’s later wife Olga Knipper as Arkadina, and the
very young Vsevolod Meyerhold as the avant-garde playwright Konstantin Treplev.

The second unique characteristic of The Seagull’s initial failure is that Chekhov,
unlike Flaubert and James, had written successful comedies before The Seagull. Both
The Bear (Медведь), originally performed in Moscow in 1888, and The Proposal
(Предложение), which was first staged in St. Petersburg two years later, were
popular with the audiences and encountered none of the problems that characterised
the early reception of both Ivanov (Иванов) and The Seagull. Chekhov himself may
have dismissed his one-act farces as insignificant and called them “stupid” (quoted in
Callow 43). Yet, it is precisely his inability to frame the “stupidity” properly that may
have doomed The Seagull as a comedy. Let me explain why.

Unlike Guy Domville, The Seagull is subtitled as a comedy but has rarely been treated as
one. Instead, the melancholy atmosphere in the second part of the play and the suicide
at the very end are usually seen as thoroughly dramatic and even tragic. Chekhov’s
label, in turn, is often either dismissed entirely or considered slightly whimsical
(compare Gottlieb 232). Yet, Chekhov clearly indicated that he had set out to write a
humorous play. In particular, he saw The Seagull’s many convoluted love relationships
as an element of romantic comedy (Chekhov, Letters 261). Most characters in the play
seem to be in love with a person who loves someone else. The brooding Konstantin is
in love with the aspiring, though not necessarily talented, actress Nina. She, in turn,
falls for the popular author Trigorin, who is otherwise Konstantin’s mother’s lover.
Arkadina herself is loved platonically by the still dashing Dorn, while Masha, the
estate manager’s daughter, pines after Konstantin but marries instead the smitten
schoolteacher Medvedenko. In a radical departure from the traditional romantic
comedy model, not one of these relationships ends happily. Masha hates her husband,
Nina gets pregnant with Trigorin but loses her baby as Trigorin returns to Arkadina,
and Konstantin shoots himself after Nina rejects him once again.
In short, most characters in The Seagull behave foolishly and should, consequently, be
a perfect target for ridicule. But we feel pity for them instead. The main reason for this
is, as in Flaubert’s and James’s plays, the absence of a proper way to foreground their

stupidity or irrationality. Compare, for instance, how differently Chekhov approaches
a very similar theme in a successful versus an unsuccessful comedy. In both cases, the
examples are from the very beginning of the play. The Bear starts with a conversation
between the recently widowed Popova and her servant Luka, who is trying to convince
her to get on with her life:
LUKA. It’s just not right, missus. You’re letting yourself fall to pieces. Cook and the maid
have gone berry picking, every living thing is out enjoying the sunshine, even your cat,
now, he’s out there trying to catch himself a bird, and here you sit, shut up in the house
all day long, like some kind of nun. That’s no fun. You listen to what I’m saying, now! It’s
been a whole year since you left the house!
POPOVA. I shall never leave this house. Why should I? My life is over. He’s dead and
buried, and so am I, buried here within these four walls. We’re both dead.

LUKA. I never heard the like! Your husband’s dead. Well, God rest him, he’s not coming
back. You mourned him good and proper; now it’s time to move on. You can’t sit here
wearing black and crying for the rest of your life. I lost my old woman, too, a while back,
I cried for a month, and that was that. No need to sit around for years singing hymns; she
wasn’t worth it. [Sighs] (…). (Chekhov, Plays 21)

As we learn later in the play, Popova’s mourning is excessive. Her late husband treated
her badly, meaning her behaviour can be seen as exaggerated without a good reason.
And there is only a short step from stupidity to ridiculousness, from being inflexible to
being unreasonable to the extent where others can observe this as well (and laugh at it).
The Seagull also starts with a character in mourning. This time, the overly melancholic
character is Masha, accompanied on her walk by her ever-so-keen suitor Medvedenko.
Here is the passage:
MEDVEDENKO. Why do you always wear black?

MASHA. Because I’m in mourning for my life. I’m not happy.

MEDVEDENKO. Why not? [Perplexed] I don’t understand why not. You’re in good health;
your father is ... well, he’s not rich, but he’s pretty well off. I’m in a lot worse shape than
you. I make twenty-three roubles a month, that’s before payroll deductions, and I’m not
in mourning. [Sits]
MASHA. It has nothing to do with money. You can be poor and still be happy.

MEDVEDENKO. Well, maybe in theory, but it doesn’t work out that way. There’s me,
my mother, my two sisters, and my little brother. I’m the wage earner, and all I get is
those twenty-three roubles. How am I supposed to buy a drink? Or sugar for tea? Or
cigarettes, even? I can’t do it. (Chekhov, Plays 111)

Even more than Popova’s, Masha’s dejection seems disproportionate. Though
Konstantin is indeed not returning her affection, dealing with rejection is not the same

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as experiencing loss. As real as her depression is, Medvedenko’s inept attempts to
alleviate it make it even more trivial. Rather than comic, Masha is pathetic (compare
Jauß, Aesthetic Experience 123–34).

The most significant difference between these two situations, and probably also the main
reason why Popova is funny while Masha is not, is that in The Bear, Luka foregrounds
Popova’s irrationality, while in The Seagull, Medvedenko only serves to exacerbate
Masha’s. Though both characters seem to have the same objective – to convince the
two women that they should snap out of their stupor – only Luka’s strategy is rational
and selfless. Medvedenko, on the other hand, registers what Masha says but then
immediately switches back to himself. In other words, the dialectic between reason and
unreason is fully formed in The Bear, but in The Seagull, it only flickers temporarily. To
sustain the comic for more than a few fleeting moments, both aspects of this intellectual
tension must be maintained, and this does not happen too often in The Seagull.
The irony is that several characters in The Seagull could have successfully
complemented the buffoons and killjoys, such as Masha, Medvedenko or Shamrayev,
or tempered the fools, such as Arkadina and Trigorin. For instance, Chekhov’s alterego, the cynical country doctor Dorn, is quite convincing as a raisonneur, and there is
a certain wisdom in Arkadina’s constantly laughing brother Sorin as well. However,
neither is placed in the right double act to fulfil this function. If Dorn had spent
more time with Konstantin, the young man might not have killed himself. Likewise,
if Trigorin had spoken more to Sorin than to Nina, he might not have found the
opportunity to seduce her. Christopher Durang attempts something along these lines
in his 2012 comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. In this play, too, a middleaged actress returns to her ancestral home and upsets everyone’s daily routines. But
because all the stooges have their foils in Durang’s parody, the unfaithful younger
lover in his text is unceremoniously dumped, and everyone survives.

Without any comparable dramaturgical interventions, in The Seagull, reason and
unreason orbit in parallel comic trajectories that rarely intersect. It almost seems as
if, after seeing how smoothly his one-act farces ran, Chekhov decided he wanted a new
challenge and reshuffled all the natural comic combinations in The Seagull. Based on
what happens in Uncle Vanya (Дядя Ваня) and The Cherry Orchard (Вишнёвый сад),
his other full-length plays that are identified as comedies, it seems that he recognised
The Seagull may have gone too far in its comic experimentation. Lopakhin and Varya
from The Cherry Orchard are not quite Lomov and Natalya from The Proposal, and it
is hard to draw a direct parallel between Popova’s refusal to shoot and Uncle Vanya’s
missed shots. However, the interaction between reason and unreason is certainly
more conventional in his two late comedies. Comic characters in these plays are still
contradictory, unpredictable and uncertain, but their irrationality is almost always

displayed in conjunction with reason. In other words, there is a method to their
madness. Chekhov’s comedy is often very subtle and rarely simple, but his characters’
insight is just as important as their triviality.

Provisional Conclusions
Three failures are, of course, too small a sample to articulate any decisive observations.
I can, however, offer some provisional conclusions. We can argue, for example, that the
success of a comedy does not depend exclusively on accurate and plausible exposure
of human foibles and weaknesses as has been the view of traditional comic theory
(compare Dryden 10:203). All three plays examined in this paper demonstrate quite
convincingly that no matter how perceptive and psychologically nuanced a depiction
of individual or collective irrationality may be, the audience still expects the authors
to balance it with reason. If the spectators want to feel truly superior to the characters,
they should not only be convinced that they are smarter than the stupid ones but also
that they are as clever as the most intelligent among them. In other words, comedy is
not just a representation of the world as unreasonable but also a genre that recognises
the crucial role that reason plays in our lives.

We can also suggest that a comedy can survive a failure in two ways: by adjusting
the values within its internal dynamic – this is what Sternheim did to Flaubert’s The
Candidate – or by pivoting permanently to a different horizon of expectations, as it
seems to have happened with Chekhov’s The Seagull. If neither can be done – the
obvious example here is James’s Guy Domville – the play will likely be forgotten or,
in case its author is very influential, be relegated to a historical footnote. If a comedy
is ahead of its time, these three options become immaterial: such a comedy simply
starts its reception cycle once the audience is ready for it.

What about the possibility that, in the future, audiences will also start to laugh at
comedies without a balanced dynamic? In more than two thousand years since
Aristophanes’ The Acharnians (Ἀχαρνεῖς), this has not happened yet. Successful
comedies have been delivering a vigorous dialectic of reason and unreason for
centuries. But a categorical answer to this question is, alas, impossible.

And one final warning: the suggestion that these three comedies by three major realist
authors were unsuccessful because they lack a proper dramaturgical dialectic cannot
explain every comic debacle. It is far more likely that problematic epistemology only
becomes an issue when a play is otherwise dramatically ambitious and has literary merit.
As I mentioned at the very beginning, there are many ways in which a comedy can fail.

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