He was the son of a brutish merchant and grandson of a serf who had bought his freedom 19 years earlier. 16, 1860, in the seaport of Taganrog, Ukraine. This may be a matter of the Japanese language translations of Chekhov it took literally generations of English-language translations for the first truly witty ones to arrive, thanks to Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and others. For one thing, there’s not a speck of humor in what Chekhov himself classified as a comedy.

Chekhov admirers may argue with various aspects of the “Uncle Vanya” we see in rehearsal here. One of the great strengths of “Drive My Car” is the way co-writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi revisits the dangerously familiar theme of art informing life, and vice versa. “It was hard work, and we had to dig deeply into our hearts,” as actor Olga Knipper (later Chekhov’s wife) said of the 1898 Moscow premiere of “Uncle Vanya.” In “Drive My Car,” a lovely movie about the interior dramas we all carry around through life, a multilingual group of actors have come to Hiroshima to prepare a production of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 play “Uncle Vanya.” The director, an emotionally isolated widower and former actor played by Hidetoshi Nishijima, sees his task as one of steering his company away from conspicuous, effortful acting - the familiar performance habits, that is, often blocking a performer’s way to a truer, easier place of emotional expression.

Chekhov play the seagull