Cherry Orchard [Hardcover]

The play takes place on the estate of Madame Ranevsky, the matriarch of an aristocratic Russian family that has fallen on financial hard times. She faces the possible loss of her family's magnificent cherry orchard.

The play is populated with interesting characters: Lopakhin, a wealthy neighbor whose father was the serf of Madame Ranevsky's father; Firs, an aged servant who longs for the "old days"; Trophimof, a student with lofty ideas; and more. There is a great deal of conflict among the characters.

"The Cherry Orchard" is about people dealing with very personal conflicts and crises while larger socioeconomic changes are going on around them. The orchard of the title is a memorable image that is well handled by Chekhov. The play contains some really effective dialogue, such as old Firs' reflection on the apparently lost art of making dried cherries. This is definitely one classic play that remains compelling.

What I like most about Chekhov is that he doesn't simplify his characters. He's a realist in this sense. Lopahkin and Trophimof each have admirable and detestable characteristics, just like you and I. While it may be set in the tumultuous period prior to the Russian revolution, the ideas and the discussions this play provokes are timeless.

Highly recommended!

What saves 'Orchard' is the merciful fact that it was written by Chekhov and not Shaw. Whatever his overall conception of the play's weighty themes - the decline of the aristocracy; the new economic power of former serfs etc. - Chekhov is simply incapable of writing mere mouthpieces, and every character, no matter how monstrous, limited, avaricious, delusive or paralysed (in action or mind), is suffused with the kind of life (flawed, egocentric, perhaps, but human) for which he had a unique, sympathetic, though always honestly satirical eye. it is a tough task to make an audience empathise with a group of silly former slave-owners, but death, loss, change, poverty, personal failure and disappointment are things we have all felt, and we would probably be lying if we couldn't find something of ourselves in most of the characters (I, worryingly, found myself most drawn to the snobbish, immature, enndearingly gauche Gaev).

There are too many emotionally loaded, privileged and enigmatic moments for characters to be simply straw targets, and the play is shot through with poignant autobiographical resonances (it was Chekhov's last, written when he was terminally ill). In fact, the one character I found thoroughly dislikable is the one who seems to make the most humanitarian sense, the revolutionary student Trophimof; but his tedious, inhuman sermons about work and the future sound too much like the Bolsheviks whose barbaric utopia would be established less than two decades later.

Unlike Wilde, say, or Shakespeare, Chekhov rarely reads very well on the page. His deliberately plain speech can seem flat, and the importance of silence, waiting, time passing with an almost painful tangibility is impossible to convey, never mind the rhythms that become so evident in performance, or the use of sound effects and music (American translations seem to me the best, fluid and not fusty; I read Carol Rocamora's this time). This is why actors treasure him - his plays are almost like sketches, giving them unprecedented freedom to create characters from hints and ambiguities.

Another difference between Shaw and Chekhov is that the former's plays are theses or theorems, designed to prove points the author is unswervingly convinced of before he's even written a word. Chekhov is rarely sure about anything, and his plays are liberatingly, if perilously, open-ended. Despite the rigid structures he fences them in, his characters always feel as if they have lived before the play and will continue to, no matter how badly, long after it.

It should also be remembered that Chekhov called 'Orchard' a comedy: it is full of characters and scenes tottering from tragedy to farce. Charlotta, the tragicomic governess, full of amazing magic tricks and ventriloquism, yet fundamentally isolated and facing a desperately uncertain future, is perhaps emblematic.