Sometimes an imperfect show can be more memorable than a more competent but less interesting one. I didn’t find Benedict Andrews’ recent production of The Cherry Orchard to be an unqualified success, but a week later I’m still carrying around some of its most powerful moments.
No traditional stage here, just a monumental brick-colored oriental carpet stretching across the entire performance space, even climbing the back wall. The audience sat around this shared space and, sitting in the front row, I found my feet resting on the rug’s edge.
As I waited for the play to begin, I noticed a young man in bare feet seated across from me. He looked like a fairly typical Brooklyn theatergoer, but the bare feet struck me as a step too far. Then I looked more closely: it was Daniel Monks, who played Kostya in Jamie Lloyd’s Seagull. Of course: he must be playing Trofimov. Monks seems to be specializing in Chekhov’s disaffected young men.
I didn’t recognize the rest of the cast at first, dressed much like the Brooklyn audience—not even Anya and Yepikhodov seated next to me. In fact, when the buffoonish Yepikhodov made his entrance by violently knocking over his chair, I jumped, afraid an audience member had fallen.
The contemporary staging and costuming gesture toward the original while never fully embracing pre-revolutionary Russia or any other recognizable time and place. I complained a year ago about the unrootedness of Steve Carell’s Uncle Vanya. Why does it work so much better here?
One reason is certainly the terrific cast, all of whom plumb the depths of their lost characters. It seems I was wrong to insist that for Chekhov to work, the production must be firmly rooted in a specific place. Chekhov works when the director and actors fully embrace the emotional truth of these people. It’s the emotions that become specific, not the setting.
There are losses in this somewhat loose production. It’s disorienting to hear Russian place names alongside prices in dollars. The ancient servant Firs makes us laugh as he mutters about “fuckwits,” but what are we to make of his reference to the “disaster” that was the emancipation of the serfs? The final scene where he is left behind in the abandoned house loses some of its potency when his character feels so untied to time and place.
And then there are the overtly contemporary interpolations. Trofimov’s rant against capitalism turns to deportations and “so-called government efficiency.” It’s almost too easy, playing to the Brooklyn audience like this.
But oh!—the memorable moments!
I’d been wondering how this bare set would transform into the emptied-out house of Act IV. As the act begins, the actors rise from their seats and begin tearing up the carpet—all of it!—leaving its fragments in piles on the bare floor. They proceed with the melancholy conclusion of the drama, making their way around these heaps of fabric.
Having the very rug pulled out from under my feet, I found myself more involved with the fate of this house than I’ve been in any previous production. It felt like a gut punch.
There was another gut punch—a quieter one—that ended Act II.
The family and their hangers-on have gathered outdoors, passing time in the open air. As the scene winds down, a shabby, slightly drunken passerby stumbles into their midst. He asks for directions to the station and frightens Varya by asking her for money. But not before he loosely quotes the opening of a popular Russian poem, “My friend, my brother, tired, suffering brother…”
Not knowing the poem, I had never paid much attention to that line. But Andrews clearly has. In this production, he reimagines the role: the vagrant becomes a very young urchin, a small boy who plants himself before Mme. Ranevskaya and sings John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery:
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go…
Adeel Akhtar, Lopakhin in this production, told an interviewer that Chekhov once commented that the pauses in his plays are “slipstreams into eternity.” I can’t verify the quote, but it perfectly describes certain moments in Chekhov—moments that seem to suspend time, containing within themselves the weight of both past and future.
This song gives us one of those slipstreams. As I watched Ranevskaya struck dumb by this boy’s angelic voice, I felt that time had stopped. I had entered that liminal space theater sometimes brings you to, where all of life, all that matters, is somehow contained in a single moment.
Not all of this production holds together. But perhaps fracture is part of the point. The best Chekhov productions make us feel the world fracturing. The rug pulled out from under me, the poor urchin stopping the heroine in her tracks by confronting her with universal loss—these are the moments, the openings into eternity, that will stay with me.
This play resonates with me in part because of my work (trusts/estates lawyer, retired) with some clients who owned real estate that had descended through a generation or two. Usually vacation property, it
is referred to as “legacy real estate” by practitioners like myself. The now-owner, often a widow, pondered whether and how to “keep it in the family” for another generation. Sometimes a sense of fealty to the forebears drove this. Virtually always the problem was money.
Taxes and deferred maintenance were a constant worry for the owner who had her own needs to consider. Would she outlive her gelt if she didn’t sell-up? And then there were the differing interests of her children: Usually one wanted it, but could never afford to buy-out others who would not use the property and thus did not want to contribute to its upkeep.
With my client feeling both skint and guilty about perhaps not continuing the legacy, and the children squabbling, paralysis often set in. One sometimes wanted to sit the family down for a breakfast of Powdermilk Biscuits, to give them all the strength to get up and do the things that need to be done. Like Lopakhin.
Whether it’s paralysis or lassitude that afflicts her and her ilk, Madam Ranevsky obviously does not want to be Lopahkin’s partner. So perhaps letting the estate go to auction is just her way of keeping her fingerprints off the inevitable destruction of the orchard. Even if it means condemning herself to penury. Talk about the price of guilt!
So thin has been my theater-going, I needed a refresher with “The Cherry Orchard,” so consulted my second-favorite time machine, YouTube (my favorite, from my childhood, was in the eponymous movie from 1960–it moved in two directions).
First up was a 1962 televised version of a then stage production, with Gielgud as Gaev and Peggy Ashcroft as Ranevsky, and Judi Dench as Anya (startlingly young-looking but at 28 already a theater veteran). Ian Holm as Trofimov. And other then well-known stage-worthies, now mostly forgotten.
Then to 1981, another film adaption of a stage production: Now Judi is Ranevsky, Harriet Walter is Varya, Anna Massey Charlotte, and Anton Lesser (so good in the recent “Endeavor” series) is Trofimov. Bill Patterson, hyperactively pitching and selling his vacation home scheme, is Lopakhin (definitely with the strength to do what needs to be done).
Final stop was a true film adaption by Michael Cacoyannis in 1999. Everything is opened-up. Charlotte Rampling is Ranevsky and Alan Bates is Gaev. Frances de la Tour chews-up some scenery as Charlotte, and Michael Gough, who acted until his death at age 94, is, appropriately, Firs. This is the least of the three.
P.S. Peggy Ashcroft didn’t make many films, though one late in life, “A Passage to India” (1984), garnered her an AA. But Alfred Hitchcock admired her stage work and gave her a plum small turn as a crofter’s wife in “The 39 Steps “(1935). In a few scenes she delivers the only credible depiction of human heartbreak in any Hitchcock film.
P.P.S I read recently that an oratorio has been written based on a Chekhov short story, “A Visit to Friends,” and with the claim that the story is a source for the later “The Cherry Orchard.” In it a Moscow lawyer is summoned by an old friend and client to her estate over which a large debt is hanging. She’s hoping her old friend can conjur a “lawyer’s trick” to save the estate.
P.P.P.S Legacy real estate is often difficult to sell, other than to a developer who will tear it down (Lopakhin predicts this end for the estate house). Often grand but fusty (especially if by water), and sometimes added-onto so much that the edifice becomes a white elephant. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person possessed of an old house must be in want of good closet space.
Thanks for this comment, Dana. It’s a wonderful example of how we respond to theater from our own experience.
You’ve certainly done your Cherry Orchard deep dive! I’ve seen at least parts of the two stage versions with the younger and older Judi Dench. The first I found a bit too precious, but I thought she was a good Ranevskaya in the later one.
BTW, if you’re a fan of Judi Dench (who isn’t it?), I highly recommend her recent book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. It’s witty, sometimes profound, and always compulsively readable.
Lisa, I’ll take that recommendation. I recently read Eileen Atkins’ memoir, “Will She Do?” It only runs to her first very big success opposite Beryl Reid in “The Killing of Sister George,” in 1966, but it’s quite absorbing. She’s a lovely writer.
Perhaps you’ve seen it, but there’s a documentary from 2018 called “Nothing Like a Dame” which brings together Dench, Atkins, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright to reminisce about their theater lives (which often crossed in productions). It’s much fun, very gossipy (Olivier comes in for some gentle bashing, including by his widow), and touching—-when asked what it was like to act with her husband, Judi turns from the camera and holds a long beat before answering). I wished it longer. Available on YouTube.
Just watched the documentary. You’re right–such pleasure to spend 90 minutes in the company of those amazing women.