Professor David Peimer
Anton Chekhov and the Birth of Poetry in Modern Theater
Summary
A close look into how Chekhov, regarded as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, revolutionized modern theater.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
I think Shakespeare is so different because Shakespeare is writing iambic pentameter, and he is writing poetry, in that sense, for his own times. And yeah, sure, you get the gravediggers in “Hamlet” and others where he’s playing with, you know, sort of natural language, if you like, but it’s not natural language, the rest of all of Shakespeare’s work. The language is iambic pentameter. That’s the structure in which they’re all writing or they’re adapting or, you know, they’re playing with. So I think it’s very different to the actual language use, so it’s different to me from a poetic realism.
I think there’s the Russian Orthodox Church. I think there’s the land and I think the end of feudalism in 1861. This distinction between are they part of Europe, Western Europe, the Enlightenment, or not, the history and so on is so different.
I think probably yes, because he says, “Well, hang on, although our father was a despot, you know, we got our talent from our father and our soul from our mother,” in a letter to his brother. So he’s not dismissive, even though he calls the father a tyrant and a despot, and every money that he earns, he sends back to the family who are living in poverty in Moscow. And the father says, “Sell the family possessions and use it to finance your education so you become a professional, a doctor.”