Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (performance transmitted from the National Theatre, London, at St James Cavalier cinema) is a great play, called by the author a comedy but certainly a dark one.
It was written when the author was already very ill from the disease that was to kill him just months after the play’s first performance.
The characters speak of beloved people who are dead, and Madame Ranevskaya (Zoe Wanamaker), the main female role, is still racked by the thought of her young son, who drowned some years before. Moreover, the last minutes of the play show a senile old servant, Firs, carelessly left locked up in the house which provides the play’s setting, facing a certain death.
The main object of the play, however, is to present a picture of a Russia in which the landed class, symbolised by Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev (James Laurenson) has ruined itself with profligate spending and by refusing to address itself to good, hard work.
Meanwhile, people who until not so long before were serfs or sons of serfs have the energy and the ambition to make money – people like Lopakhin (Conleth Hill) who is on his way to becoming a millionaire.
Lopakhin is aware of the changing needs of society, and knows that the new moneyed class will want property, bought or rented, to holiday in, but he lacks the vision of the future offered by the “eternal student” Trofimov, who attacks the intelligentsia of Russia for being careless about working, and for treating the working class with contempt.
Howard Davies’ direction of the play emphasises above all the decadence of the old nobility, a decadence expressed not just by what they say, but also by the state of their property. The large room in which three of the play’s acts take place has nothing elegant or even comfortable about it, and the wooden parts of the walls clearly need serious refurbishment.
Varya, Ranevksaya’s adopted daughter, who is the housekeeper, has little money to spend on good food for all, and when Ranevskaya decides to invite people from the community to a little dance party, she can employ only a small Jewish band to play, and the guests are socially humble.
The cherry orchard of the title is the great glory of Ranevskaya’s estate. Despite her great financial straits, she refuses to consider selling off even a part of it, despite Lopakhin’s strong advice, and when the estate is sold by auction, Ranevskaya is shocked to learn the buyer is Lopkhin himself who, despite his affectionate reverence for Ranevskaya, cannot let such a great opportunity for making a great deal of money pass by.
The play ends not just with Firs awaiting death but also with the sound of axes cutting down the orchard trees.
Dramatically, the play’s defect lies in the long first act in which the audience is introduced to many characters and has to establish, not always easily, who they are and how they are related to the others.
This act has a great deal of dialogue and very little action and when it is followed without break, as in this production, by the longish second act, the strain on the audience is considerable. Chekhov was right to insist on bringing out the comic elements in the play, but these elements are not so strong, and Howard Davies has done little to strengthen them.
The play’s dramatic qualities lie mostly in the conflicts between the different social classes or between those characters, one of whom is in love with another who does not feel the same.
An example of this is the maid Dunyasha (Emily Taafe), with whom the diffident estate clerk Yepihodov (Pip Carter) is hopelessly in love and threatens to shoot himself, and who in turn is attracted to the arrogant manservant Yasha (Gerald Kyd).
In the second act, the scene with the tramp in which Chekhov illustrates the upper class’s fear of working class violence, brings a touch of danger to the production, and in the third act the merriment attending Ranevskaya’s ball is infiltrated by the fear of disaster and collapses entirely when the news of Lopakhin’s buying of the estate is announced by the man himself.
The last act, shows Ranevskaya preparing to leave the house for ever, with all the other characters trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to prepare for a decent future.
This is a very subtle scene, full of half-expressed emotions, most moving of which is Lopakhin’s half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to woo Varya (Claudie Blakley) who loves him but is too religiously-minded to make any serious attempt to attract him. Here, I felt, Davies fully captures the Chekhovian spirit.
Wanamaker rarely shows aristocratic disdain for the inferior classes, the two main moments being the encounter with the tramp in act two, and her frozen reaction to Lopakhin’s triumphant announcement that he has bought the estate.
Strangely enough, her shock seems to have passed by the last act, when she prods Lopakhin for the last time to propose marriage to Varya. Though this is not a great Ranevskaya, it is certainly a likeable one, allowing the audience to be tolerant of her decision to go back to her feckless lover in Paris.
Conleth Hill’s Lopakhin makes a strong contrast between his respectful and loving attitude of the first act and the consciousness of being victorious and guilt-free after his third-act coup in acquiring Ranevskaya’s estate. This makes his refusal to tie himself down to the worthy but unattractive Varja more understandable. Clearly, he is the kind of man who will build the economy of the new Russia, until the Soviets break him and his class as well.
How could I not like James Laurenson’s talkative and not too intelligent Gaev, and not smile at his absurd address to the bookcase in act one?
Mark Bonnar makes the most of Trofimov’s splendid speeches in act two, but he is accused in the play of being a talker, not a doer – after all, at 30, he is still a student – and Chekhov allows us to doubt whether the great future he promises Charity Wakefield’s Anya (Ranevskaya’s daughter) can ever come true.