Swan Song (Calchas)

1 "Swan Song (Calchas)" is a one-act "dramatic study" Chekhov wrote in 1887 (first published under the title "Calchas" in the magazine Sezon, no. 88, September 1887, and staged that November at Korsh’s theater in Moscow with the title changed to "Swan Song"). It is set entirely on the bare stage of a small provincial theater at night, just after a performance has ended. Vasily Vasilyich Svetlovidov, a 68-year-old comic actor still in the costume of Calchas – the prophet-priest of the Trojan War in Greek myth, a stock tragic role – wakes to find he has drunk himself to sleep in his dressing room and been left locked in, alone, by the departing company. Nikita Ivanych, the theater’s old prompter, who has nowhere else to sleep and beds down secretly in the dressing rooms, emerges and keeps him company through the small hours.

2 The play is built almost entirely as a monologue for Svetlovidov, with Nikita Ivanych’s brief, deferential lines serving mainly as a listening post and occasional scene partner when Svetlovidov breaks into recitation. Roused first to self-disgust and then to genuine terror at his own old age and isolation – unmarried, without family, uncertain even of having a real home to return to – Svetlovidov delivers the extended confession that gives the piece its title: "the song is sung" (spета песня), the swan song of a life spent, as he sees it, squandering a real talent on clownish, unserious roles. But the mood swings sharply when he tests his voice against fragments of serious classical repertoire – Pushkin’s "Boris Godunov," Shakespeare’s "King Lear,Hamlet," and "Othello," and Griboyedov’s "Woe from Wit" – and finds the old power still answers his call. The play stages a genuine question about art and aging: is talent something a life can use up, or something that outlasts the body it seemed to abandon? Chekhov leaves the two men’s exit ambiguous, the swagger of the recitations sitting uneasily against the loneliness just confessed.