McKellan makes a heroic misfit of him, quick to suspect that his enthusiasm is being mocked, determined to have his say and let the mockery rain, jumpy as a sparrow with a cat around, incapable of showing love without making it seem anger, sure that he is “narrow‐minded, blind, second‐rate” while insisting that all about him attend scrupulously to his outbursts. The principal figure, for instance, is not Vanya‐George at all-indeed Vanya‐George kills himself before that forest can begin to burn-but the “wood demon” of the title, the restless, fanatical, selfdeprecating, furiously demanding doctor. Whole stretches of “Vanya” are already here: two standoffish women deciding at last to trust each other, the disconsolate Vanya (née George) summoning up halfdrunken courage to force himself upon the youthful wife of an aging, pontifical writer, the thunderclap that comes of the writer's arbitrary disposition of the family estates.īut there are other things here, too, and some I find myself rueful to have lost. It's fascinating to sit before this ex cellent youngish Actors Company-born scarcely two years ago in Britain, democratically organized and run-and watch past and future slip in and out like coins in a magician's hand. A good man can find his pleasure in what is and in what yet be.

But certainly he is doing just what Chekhov did with “The Wood Demon.” Eight years after he'd written the play, a relatively early and relatively light‐hearted trial flight, Chekhov simply set creative fire to vast portions of it and planted in its stead “Uncle Vanya.” The later play is a distillation of the earlier-waste characters have been done away with, charming though they may have been, and the web in which those remaining writhe has been more judiciously spun-but it doesn't deny the earlier any more than it denies the exultation of tearing down to rebuild. We don't know that he stands for Chekhov, and there's no need to force him into the role. “I'll plant new ones!” he cries gaily, quite beyond himself, as he runs. Well, of course he'll try to help save the trees. He kicks his heels in joy before hurrying to the conflagration, as mysteriously elated as he is transparently anxious. And he does do that, but very oddly indeed.

Knowing him as we do, in Ian McKellan's beautifully intemperate performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, we expect him to leap to his feet in fury and race off to help quench the flames. The one most immediately concerned is Khruschov, impatient doctor to them all, passionate devotee of forestry, a chap in boots and peasant blouse who likes to help God create by planting birch trees and whose anger is unbounded when he contemplates the loss of so much as a sapling. TOWARD the very end of Chekhov's “The Wood Demon,” when three or four couples on a country estate are trying to rearrange the raggle‐taggle patterns of their lives, there is a flash fire in a patch of woods nearby.

Chekhov wood demon