Eschewing what he called the 'sentimental morality' of such all-toofamiliar versions, Griffiths cut to the jugular in his own version by refashioning the student Trofimov in his own image, as a clear-headed Marxist, with overt, revolutionary intentions, who lambastes the tsarist oppression of the poor by famously describing the urban masses as living in 'shit'. The original Russian word is, of course, typically Chekhovian in its neutrality. Trofimov, talking of the overcrowding in urban tenements, says–and this is as literal as I can make it – 'everywhere bedbugs, a (bad) smell, damp, moral uncleanliness'. In Elisaveta Fen's (1954: 364) version for Penguin, this is translated as 'bedbugs, bad smells, damp and immorality everywhere'. In Griffiths' version, we leap to 'bedbugs, shit, leaking roofs, moral degradation'. It may only be a single word, but it's a word that expresses Griffiths's rage rather than Chekhov's point of view. Its ring is as hollow, as also, in the production was the Marxist-cum-black-power salute given by Trofimov at the end of another pedagogic speech in Act 2. This new and more dynamic Trofimov certainly lent an edgy, political dimension to Griffiths' version of the play, but one can't help agreeing with critic Michael Billington, that for all its power, Griffiths's text was offering us a 'cunningly editorialised version' of the original (Billington, 1984: 15).

The danger, as Billington so rightly observed, was that whilst the Griffiths Cherry Orchard was a highly intelligent and playable translation, it perhaps offered rather too much hindsight in its more overt suggestions of political change in the air. Griffiths's view, however, was that by strengthening the roles of the 'new men' (that is Trofimov and Lopakhin) and moving the emphasis away from Ranevskaya, he had 'shifted the forces of the play and re-ordered its inherent balances’ (Griffiths, 1978: vi). Such an interpretation, based on a reading of The Cherry Orchard as demonstrating Chekhov's faith in progress, is in fact a very Soviet one. And it is one that kept Soviet academics occupied for many years, as they struggled to offer up communist readings of an unrepentantly apolitical playwright. Throughout the 73 years of Soviet rule, productions in Russia strived to overcome the obstacle of what Chekhov himself called his 'indifferentism' (Frayn, 1996: xvii) and present his plays as the clarion call of revolution. But this is to deny one of the fundamentals of Chekhov's art: his insistence that the author must be an impartial witness – nothing more (Frayn, 1996: xx).

The 2002 production by Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse of Brian Friel's version of Uncle Vanya presented a particularly vexed problem for me, as Russian consultant. In places it was utterly inspired in its distillation of the spirit of the original and in some of its more imaginative reworkings of idiom. But it was also very free with the original text, and, more troublingly, in places it totally ignored historical accuracy. I wondered, when I opened the programme on the first night and saw its title page cheekily announce that I was about to see 'Uncle Vanya by Brian Friel, a version of the play by Chekhov', whether I was the only person to be more than a little taken aback by Friel's chutzpah. Guardian critic Michael Billington's review of the production, which he praised for its 'visual clarity and emotional charity' was quickly tempered by the observation that the production was nevertheless 'more a Friel-isation than a faithful realisation' (Billington, 2002: 20). And indeed, as one reads through the text, despite being impressed with Friel’s undoubted flair as adaptor-playwright, his use of artistic licence results in a wholesale reworking of Telegin's character.

What also alarmed me was to find in Act 4, where Vanya and Sonya sit down to itemise their expenditure on staple Russian commodities such as lenten oil and buckwheat flour, that Friel's version had transformed this into a discussion about the purchase of barbed wire and fencing posts. In 19th-century, rural Russia? It was as though the Voinitsky estate had suddenly been picked up by a whirlwind and plopped down in the American Midwest. It is utterly absurd to talk of land being fenced off with barbed wire and posts in the black earth region of 19th-century Russia. Vanya does not manage a cattle ranch; and in any case, he is far too impoverished to be able to afford expensive barbed wire, imported from the USA, or luxuries such as ready-made fencing posts. Such a cavalier reworking of the original text was anachronistic at best and ill-informed at worst.

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