Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
WSports hat and The Cherry Orchard? Like new production and Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh in Stratford, I am reminded that it is a question people have been asking since the play began. Chekhov himself wrote that what came out of his play was “not a play but a comedy, rather almost a farce”. Stanislavski, who directed the Moscow play in 1904, disagreed. “It is tragic,” said Chekhov, “that any hope of a good life you may have is at an end.”
As the debate rages on, I hope we won’t be told by anyone involved in the new RSC productions that they will soon restore the comedy of the show. It is very difficult for the British to take this play and see it as a lament for the decline and fall of the pseudo-Edwardian aristocracy. From my experience with the game – and I’ve seen about 20 – this is simply not true. We often do well at The Cherry Orchard because its blend of styles and ideas is what has made it our wonderful heritage. Avoiding the culture of French education, in which tragedy and comedy are clearly defined, we are accustomed to the glorious ugliness of drama: a culture that can create. Twelfth Night should have no problem understanding The Cherry Orchard.
I saw this play in 1961 in an RSC production directed by Michel Saint-Denis. It was full of laughs, especially in the mind of Gaev’s John Gielgud when he said mockingly, “I will be a banker”: he will work in a bank. But, all the same, I’ve never forgotten the sad look on Dorothy Tutin’s Varya’s face as she knelt on the ground holding a trunk, waiting for George Murcell’s Lopakhin’s proposal that never came. Even this had its funny side as Murcell ran around with a doorknob trying to escape.
The critic Eric Bentley, as often, saw it well when he said that there is nothing paradoxical about Chekhov: he is, if anything, exactly. That has become a hallmark of British-made products. Michael Blakemore did a great job National Theatre in his old Vic where he made the destruction of the orchard seem like an inevitable part of history. At the same time, there was always a joke with the revolutionary Trofimov talking about the struggle of people to find the great truth while struggling hopelessly with his galoshes.
Mike Alfreds also produced an over-the-top version for the National in 1985 that beautifully captured the emotional conflict that is so important to Chekhov. Ian McKellen’s Lopakhin, having bought the place, excitedly shook the keys of the house as if he wanted to gouge out someone’s eye and rushed to comfort Sheila Hancock while crying Ranyevskaya.
Being in Shakespeare, British actors are very good at managing the sudden changes that are prevalent in Chekhov. Penelope Wilton’s Ranyevskaya in the 1995 RSC production was one minute hilariously imitating a crocodile she allegedly ate in Paris and the next reaching out to David Troughton’s stooping Lopakhin for a grand duchess kiss. The same contradictions were evident in Zoë Wanamaker’s performance in the episode Howard Davies’ world production in 2011: when he mentions Mark Bonnar’s Trofimov, in the cruel words of Andrew Upton, he “slowed down” and immediately hugs him consolingly.
What I am saying loud and clear is that the British are very good at Chekhov. But, if there’s one production of The Cherry Orchard that bothers me, it’s Peter Stein’s for the Berlin Schaubühne in 1989. In the program notes, Stein described the play, like Polonius, as “Tragedy. Comedy. Pastoral. Farce” and pushed each group to the limit. The farce was blatantly farcical and the party in the third act finds Gogolian nonsense as very short men dance with very tall women. Pastoral work was shown with a touching moment in the first act when the shutters of the nursery were opened and we saw a white cherry blossom that made you realize, more than ever, why the family could not share the place.
Stein had the kind of equipment, time and combination not available to British directors. Through it all, we still have a close and moral relationship with Chekhov. With two new productions of his last and best play he deserves – the first in Stratford-upon-Avon and the next in the West End with Kristin Scott Thomas in the autumn – you might say it’s about time you heard more about Cherry Orchards.
