June 30, 2011: Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
In a new adaptation by Andrew Upton. National Theatre Live production, broadcast at Amherst Cinema, Amherst, Massachusetts, from the Olivier Theatre, NT. Running time 2 hrs 45 mins, including an interval. With Zoë Wanamaker as Madame Ranevskaya.
The designer, Bunny Christie, interviewed on screen, said that she had come across what she considered the perfect material for the setting of Chekhov’s play in a photograph of a disused industrial building in London. She went and viewed the building, found it in a dilapidated state, with wooden walls long ago having lost whatever paint they once had, exposed to time and the elements; and there she had her setting for the play. A model of the set was also shown in the interview, and it drew together a picture of advanced domestic decay. It is a house of which its owners, Ranevskaya and her brother Gaef, hold many joint memories, but for all that it appears to us as a drafty, oversize barn, scant protection against harsh Russian winters and a generally unfriendly place.
And yet in the midst of this barren, time-worn hostel, the humanity that Chekhov conjures up and that the director Howard Davies has reified here is extraordinary. The casting is wonderful, without exception. The faces are memorable, and beautifully well contrasted, and we get to see them close up, even while the cameras alternatively drop back and give us a sense of a vibrant ensemble, alive and feeling, even while each act manages to cast the spell of its own mood on the proceedings. That mood is driven by the overall action of the play: in the structure that Chekhov imposes, we see an arrival, a sojourn, and a departure, and the process of this action carries out the promise, or rather the threat, that the cherry orchard — which is both the orchard itself and the larger property and house of which it is a part — will be sold to pay its deep, unmanageable debts. And yet Peter Trofimov’s pronouncement that “All Russia is our orchard,” while thoroughly typical of this anarchist and idealist himself, is the truth that governs the converging meanings of the play. What we see presented to us is no less than a way of life, a culture that values what it values so greatly and clings to so compulsively that it is unable to let go and face the unpleasant facts of change.
Davies’s direction makes this emergent truth clear, on the level of character and, just as clearly, on the level of ideas; and neither gets in the way of the other. The play is beautifully acted, and we are never distracted from the delicate nuances and bold statements that together advance the action unerringly, even while we are granted the apparent leisure to become absorbed in the clarifying, shifting, and modulating relationships that this play, like all of Chekhov’s plays, seems to be made up of entirely. It is a gift of a high order, to be able to pull all this together while never allowing a false or artificial note to intrude.
Zoë