The Hampstead Players` Autumn production is Chekhov`s Cherry Orchard. The director, Bill Risebero, hopes you will find it entertaining and life-affirming.
Chekhov only just qualifies as a 20th Century dramatist, having died in 1904, soon after the first production of Cherry Orchard, his last play. But with Ibsen, Brecht and Beckett he set the ground rules for 20th Century drama. One influential contribution was his way of looking at wider society through the microcosm of domestic life. His plays (like his unsurpassed short stories) reflect great social changes by showing their effects on the lives of ordinary people, whom he portrays with great psychological insight.
Like life itself, his work is characteristically tragi-comic, alternating between humour and pathos, setting one against the other. He was not active politically, but he was deeply concerned with people and their lives, and though he was not a formal worshipper, his search for the spiritual shows clearly in his work.
Cherry Orchard reflects two related social changes in 19th Century Russia. One of these was political revolution. Since the abortive Decembrist coup in 1825, overthrowing the Tsarist regime had been an urgent topic of debate. Russian progressives, like Trofimov in the play, were eagerly aware of revolution in Western Europe and anticipated such changes in Russia.
The other was economic reform. As if to head off the crisis that was to come, Tsar Alexander II began to replace the exploitative feudal system with modern capitalism. One aspect of this was the Emancipation, which ended centuries of serfdom. This was double edged – some former serfs, like Lopakhin in the play, were able to make a lot of money. Most others (and Firs in the play is aware of this) merely found one kind of exploitation replaced by another.
For Chekhov, rural Russia was the scene of these changes. He was born in 1860 near the Sea of Azov, in southern Russia, a world which often appears in his writing. He travelled in Western Europe and throughout Russia, including Siberia, settling finally in Yalta by the Black Sea. However, he is particularly associated with Moscow, with the newly-formed Moscow Art Theatre and its director Konstantin Stanislavsky.
Here Chekhov`s plays were performed, along with those of other pioneering dramatists like Gogol (Government Inspector) and Turgenev (Month in the Country). Though Chekhov saw Cherry Orchard as a satirical comedy, Stanislavsky, to Chekhov`s distress, insisted it was a tragedy. He gave it a slow, elegiac moodiness, which established a received wisdom about how Chekhov plays should be performed. The story is that in the Moscow Art Theatre production the last act of Cherry Orchard took 40 minutes. Chekhov said he wanted it done in twelve!
Fast or slow, Cherry Orchard is generally accepted as Chekhov`s greatest play. `How difficult it was for me to write`, he said. It is set, around 1900, on the country estate of Madame Lyubov Ranyevskaya. She has just returned after five years in Paris to face a crisis. The family fortunes are waning and the estate, with its historic orchard and its poignant family memories, may have to be sold to pay the debts. Lopakhin, the former serf now made rich, advises how to develop the estate to avoid bankruptcy.
But indecision rules. The family, their household and their friends are confused by the social changes and the challenges they bring, both to their ways of life and to their personal relationships. What to do with the estate, whether to stay or to go, whom to love, or be loved by, or whether even to love at all – these questions all demand answers. Some of them are answered by the end of the play, though it would be wrong to call this a resolution. Chekhov is open-ended – his plays allow us a glimpse into people`s lives, which still continue after we have stopped observing them.
If you came to our `Cheerful Chekhov` presentation in October, you will easily recognise him as a comic writer. Cherry Orchard though, like all great comedies, has deeply poignant moments. It has energy, humour, much lively movement, music and dance, numerous entrances and exits which border on the farcical – and also moments of near-tragedy. Hampstead Parish Church is a unique space, which lends itself to an imaginative spatial treatment of such a lively and dynamic play.
We will present our version of The Cherry Orchard on 26th, 28th, 29th and 30th November, in Hampstead Parish Church.
The Cherry Orchard
Bill Risebero