Tynan's Anger

Image via WikipediaTalking points from tonight’s Artist Talk with Tom Stoppard and David Remnick at BAM (not quoted verbatim):

The great innovation of Chekhov was his fundamental neutrality towards his characters. It seems jarring to consider The Cherry Orchard or Ivanov as comedies, but they are comedies in the same way that life is a comedy.

As he wrote in Ivanov, Chekhov recognized that in every human interaction the following conditions exist: I don’t know what you’re thinking, you don’t know what I’m thinking, and neither of us knows what ourselves are thinking.

In translation, it is not good to be a linguist. It is good to have an exactly literal translation as a reference point, but in translating it is more important to have to understand meaning and tone more than to strictly what is actually said (Stoppard doesn’t read Russian).

There is no such thing as a finished translation. When you write your own work, you’re done with it at the end of the day and you’re happy with it. But when you’re working on someone else’s work, there’s no way to compress and finish the creative process of translation.

In a free democracy, where there are no restraints on the media, the culture becomes saturated, and opinions lose their importance matter. But in a world where thought is restricted, media becomes a prime focus. Behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia and Russia, students would frequently go to the cafés asking for when the next article by a popular radical thinker came out.

It is hard to adjust from that mindset to one if a free-, media saturated society.
At the same time, it is not in human nature to see the positives of the good of a media saturated world. We want every opinion to matter, and can’t focus on the fact that thought is free.

In the New York theater world, there’s more of a focus on “how we’re doing “ than in London. The Broadway producer plays a larger role than the West End producer. It’s partly based on capitalism, but it’s more of a cultural focus on success and fear of failure.

There are more small theaters in New York than there ever were before. Despite the disparity between musicals and straight plays in New York, and increasingly in London, the next new play is still the great animal everyone in theater is trying to catch.

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Labels: broadway, brooklyn academy of music, chekhov, David Remnick, london, new york, tom stoppard