The Cherry Orchard E-Book

Anton Chekhov

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 123

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Chekhov's classic tragicomedy, translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine. Aristocratic landowner Ranevskaya can no longer afford to keep her childhood home with its beautiful but barren cherry orchard. She rejects the compromise offered by Lopakhin, a local businessman, to cut down the orchard and sell the land for holiday homes. Eventually Ranevskaya and her family are forced to leave the estate which Lopakhin has now bought. Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was first staged at the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1904 in a production directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. This translation by Stephen Mulrine, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, was first performed by English Touring Theatre in 2000.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THECHERRY ORCHARD

byAnton Chekhov

translated and with an introduction byStephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

For Further Reading

Chekhov: Key Dates

Dramatis Personae

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Guide to Pronunciation of Names

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, a seaport in South Russia, in 1860. By his own account, his childhood was far from idyllic. His father Pavel was a domestic tyrant, fanatically religious, and Chekhov and his brothers were forced to rise before dawn to sing in the local church choir, then work long hours after school, in the family grocer’s shop.

Taganrog was in decline, but its Greek shipping community was relatively wealthy, and Chekhov was first sent to a Greek-language school, which his father naively regarded as the highway to a lucrative career. After a wasted year, Chekhov was enrolled in the local high school, where he stayed, an unremarkable scholar, until 1879.

His last years at the Taganrog school were spent apart from his family, however, since his bankrupt father had fled to Moscow, where Chekhov’s elder brothers were already students. Chekhov completed his studies, entered Moscow University’s Faculty of Medicine, and at the age of nineteen became the family’s principal breadwinner, writing short comic pieces to supplement his student allowance.

By the time he qualified in 1884, Chekhov’s literary ambitions were already in conflict with what he regarded as his true vocation. Indeed until his own health collapsed, he continued to practise medicine, mostly as an unpaid service to nearby rural communities. Chekhov was almost certainly infected with tuberculosis from childhood, and the disease was in its terminal stages before he would permit an independent diagnosis. In addition to frequent haemorrhaging from the lungs, which forced him to spend the winters in the warm South, Chekhov also suffered from a variety of other chronic ailments, yet his work rate was little short of heroic. In 1899, when he agreed to sell the rights in his works to the publisher Marks, they already filled ten volumes, and the critical consensus is that his short stories are an unparalleled achievement, with the three great plays of his mature dramatic method, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, no less important.

Human relationships are the substance of all Chekhov’s work, and it is perhaps no surprise that this most intimate of writers remained elusive in his own. Although fond of women, and pursued by several, Chekhov characteristically retreated as they advanced, and it is a reasonable assumption that the happiness of his brief married life, with the actress Olga Knipper, depended to an extent on the lengthy periods of separation forced on the couple by the dramatist’s poor health, and Olga’s busy metropolitan career.

Finally, in a despairing effort to postpone the inevitable, Chekhov travelled with Olga to Germany for medical treatment, and in July 1904, following a heart attack, he died in the spa town of Badenweiler, at the age of forty-four.

The Cherry Orchard: What Happens in the Play

The curtain rises on a room in a large country house, the property of Madame Ranevskaya, and set on an estate once famous for its vast cherry orchard, but presently bankrupt, and soon to be sold at auction. It is a frosty May morning, and Dunyasha, a maidservant, and Lopakhin, the son of a serf, but now a wealthy businessman, are waiting for Ranevskaya to arrive from the local railway station. She has spent the past five years abroad, where she fled after the deaths, in rapid succession, of her alcoholic husband, and her seven-year-old son Misha, tragically drowned in a nearby river.

In France, Ranevskaya has been living with her lover, whom she nursed through a long illness, only to be cast aside when her money ran out. Her daughter Anya, accompanied by her eccentric German governess, Charlotta, has travelled to Paris to fetch her home. Ranevskaya’s return is an emotional event, and the very room, formerly the nursery, is itself charged with memories.

The first act assembles the entire household, including Ranevskaya’s indolent brother Gaev; her adopted daughter-cum-housekeeper Varya, constantly agonising over the estate’s finances and her stalled love for Lopakhin; Simeonov-Pishchik, a local landowner, also near-bankrupt, and a persistent borrower; Yepikhodov, the estate clerk, and self-confessed ‘walking disaster’; and Firs, an old family retainer, who can remember life before the Emancipation, when the cherry orchard bore fruit in abundance and was regarded as a national treasure.

Also present, but purposely being kept out of sight, is Trofimov, the former tutor of Ranevskaya’s dead child. When he appears, her memories of her beloved Misha are painfully re-awakened. Trofimov is in his late twenties, the ‘eternal student’, but his radical politics and idealism, which Lopakhin routinely mocks, have made a powerful impact on the naive Anya. Ranevskaya is also attended by a manservant, Yasha, whose veneer of Parisian sophistication fails to mask his native boorishness. Dunyasha, however, is already sufficiently captivated by him to turn down Yepikhodov’s proposal of marriage.

In terms of the main action, the sale of the estate, Lopakhin offers Ranevskaya a way out of her difficulties – to cut down the cherry orchard and build holiday cottages for town-dwellers on the cleared land. Ranevskaya and Gaev, however, flatly reject the idea, and various alternatives are discussed, none of them with any likelihood of success.

The second act brings the date of the auction closer, but as the characters enjoy the sunset, on an idyllic summer evening, nothing has changed. Lopakhin is still urging his ‘rescue plan’, Ranevskaya and Gaev cling obdurately to their hopes of a loan. Ranevskaya tells Lopakhin that Varya is in love with him, and he casually agrees they should get married. Trofimov makes a long polemical speech about the health of the nation, and the hypocrisy of the middle classes, and finds an unlikely echo in Lopakhin, for whom hard work is the answer to all ills. During a lull in the conversation, an eerie sound is heard in the distance – like that of a breaking string – and the characters experience a sudden feeling of unease. Later, Trofimov and Anya discuss their love – in Trofimov’s case, so idealised as to be beyond ordinary human emotion.

The third act takes place in the drawing room; it is the day of the auction, and a dance is in progress, with guests from the village. Simeonov-Pishchik, as ever, is trying to borrow money from Ranevskaya, while Varya despairs at the latter’s extravagance. Ranevskaya confesses to Trofimov that she intends returning to Paris, to her worthless lover, and his attempt to dissuade her results in a furious argument, during which she accuses him of being emotionally stunted.

Yepikhodov is making a nuisance of himself as usual, and when Varya chases him from the room, threatening him with a stick, she almost strikes Lopakhin, who has just returned from the auction, along with Gaev, both a little drunk. Lopakhin tells the company that the estate has finally been sold, and to everyone’s astonishment, reveals that he himself is the buyer. Varya bursts into tears, flings her housekeeper’s keys to the floor and storms out, while Lopakhin, whose father was once a serf on the estate, celebrates his triumph.

Act IV brings the play full circle, to a frosty October morning in the former nursery, now almost bare of furniture and littered with trunks and suitcases, ready for the family’s departure. The work of cutting down the orchard has already begun, and farewells are being said. Lopakhin and Trofimov discover a mutual understanding, and even respect; Simeonov-Pishchik, now solvent after a land deal, improbably arrives to repay his debts; Gaev looks forward to a career as a paid employee of the bank; Yasha predictably casts aside the wretched Dunyasha, as he prepares to return to the boulevards of Paris.

Ranevskaya, meanwhile, is exercised by last-minute anxieties about old Firs, who was supposed to have been taken to hospital, and Varya. She confirms that Lopakhin is willing to marry Varya, and brings them together, for the formal proposal. Lopakhin, however, is somehow unable to find the words, and the opportunity is lost. Ranevskaya bids a tearful goodbye to her family home, and the stage is left empty and silent. After a few moments, old Firs appears – he has been forgotten after all, and is obviously unwell. He tries the door, but finds it locked, and lies down on a sofa, presumably to die. The sound of the distant breaking string is heard once more, and then the axe, biting into the cherry orchard.

Chekhov the Dramatist

Chekhov might be described as the writer’s writer, not only on account of his work, or the fund of wisdom in his correspondence, but also the example he presents of the tireless self-improver, grinding his way over a mere two decades from penny-a-line squibs in the comic papers, to the status of modern classic, in both his preferred genres.

In that respect, the year 1887-88 represents a turning-point in his career, with the production of his first four-act play, Ivanov, and the publication of his short story The Steppe in one of the prestige ‘thick journals’, ‘The Northern Herald’. The same year also saw his official recognition as a major Russian writer with the award of the Pushkin Prize, by the Academy of Sciences. Chekhov had arrived, it seems, though the reception given to Ivanov, premièred in Moscow to mixed cheering and booing, suggested he had arrived as a dramatist some distance ahead of his audience.

That is broadly the story of Chekhov’s dramatic career, and it is significant that the main bone of contention in Ivanov, dividing first-nighters into partisans and scoffers, was the author’s seeming abdication of any clear moral stance. After some changes, however, the play was successfully revived in St. Petersburg, and Chekhov was sufficiently encouraged to offer The Wood Demon for production in Moscow the following year. Alas, The Wood Demon was a flop, and in the light of Chekhov’s developing method, it is interesting to note that criticism generally centred on its lack of action, and dreary slice-of-life dialogue. Chekhov withdrew the play in disgust, and buried it deep within his mysterious creative processes, whence it re-surfaced in 1898, in the radically altered form of Uncle Vanya, one of the greatest works of the modern theatre.

Between times, in 1896, Chekhov also endured the catastrophic failure of The Seagull, an experience which encapsulated everything that was wrong with the Russian theatre of his day, and which his work did so much to change. The Seagull was premièred in October 1896 at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, having spent almost a year in the hands of the censors, and the actors received their scripts a bare week before opening night. The play had been commissioned from Chekhov as a vehicle for the benefit performance of one of the Aleksandrinsky’s stars, Levkeeva, a mature comedienne with a large and vociferous following. She had originally been billed to play Arkadina, and disappointment at her failure to appear soon gave way to whistling and jeering.

After the fiasco of The Seagull, Chekhov fled from St. Petersburg, and although the play’s fortunes improved with ‘normal’ audiences, the generally hostile reviews made him resolve to quit the theatre for ever. Fortunately, the first great play of his maturity as a dramatist, Uncle Vanya, appears to have been already on the stocks, and while the course of its development out of The Wood Demon remains a mystery, it most likely followed The Seagull. At any rate, Uncle Vanya first surfaced in 1897, when Chekhov had it published.

The following year, 1898, saw the coming together of Chekhov and the newly-founded Moscow Art Theatre – a meeting commonly presented as a marriage made in theatre heaven. Both parties shared an intense dissatisfaction with the Russian theatre of the day, its bombastic acting, poor technical standards, and outmoded star system. What Chekhov’s plays needed – natural, unforced speaking, evenhanded ensemble playing and meticulous rehearsal – appeared to be exactly what the Moscow Art Theatre, led by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, could bring to them. And if the marriage turned out to be less than wholly blissful, it is to their credit nonetheless, that Chekhov continued to write for the stage, including the two masterpieces specially commissioned by the Moscow Art Theatre, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard.

The rapturous reception accorded to The Seagull at its Moscow première on December 17th, 1898, has passed into theatre legend. Its success not only restored Chekhov’s confidence, it also rescued the Moscow Art Theatre, now eager to attempt Uncle Vanya, which had already been staged in the provinces. Unfortunately, Chekhov had promised the play to the Maly Theatre, but the script changes being demanded by its literary committee gave him a legitimate excuse for withdrawing the offer. Uncle Vanya was thus produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in October 1899 – in terms of its reception, more consolidation than triumph, but sufficiently encouraging to focus Chekhov’s mind on a new subject – the lives of three sisters in a remote provincial town.

Three Sisters opened in January 1901, and while it was certainly no failure, neither it, nor The Cherry Orchard three years later, managed to repeat the smash hit of The Seagull. By the spring of 1903, when he began committing The Cherry Orchard to paper, Chekhov had little more than a year to live, and his health had deteriorated to such an extent that he could write only a few lines a day. Nonetheless, he was able to attend rehearsals at the Moscow Art Theatre in December, an experience which did nothing to improve either his temper, or Stanislavsky’s. The Cherry Orchard was premièred on Chekhov’s forty-fourth birthday, January 17th, 1904, and the author was pushed unwillingly on stage to receive a rapturous ovation. However, the play itself was not an immediate success, and certainly not in Chekhov’s eyes. In April, still smarting at Stanislavsky’s interpretation, he wrote to Olga Knipper from Yalta, complaining at the work being advertised as a ‘drama’, rather than as a comedy. Three months later, Chekhov was dead, and the brief span of his career as a dramatist complete. We can only guess at what he might have achieved, had he lived as long as Ibsen, say, but in a mere handful of plays, Chekhov has given the classic repertoire not only a unique vision, but also, in his oblique, low-key rhetoric, one of its most compelling modern voices.

The Cherry Orchard in Performance

Like all Chekhov’s major plays, The Cherry Orchard is constructed on a pattern of arrival – sojourn – departure: a newcomer or returning absentee enters a hitherto stable community, and brings about a series of changes, generally for the worse, in the characters’ lives. In purely abstract terms, this pattern is at its most schematic in The Cherry Orchard