Chekhov, Chairs, Complexity
ELIZABETH ALLEN on the multi-faceted Cherry Orchard
Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is a slippery play, mood and perhaps genre shifting within the same scene: farce and frivolity jostle with pain and loss. While asking us to reflect on the big issues (what gives value to life? What meaning do we give to the loss of the orchard’s beauty?) it engages us not only with the complexities and histories of the central pair, the landowner and the peasant boy turned affluent businessman who is about to buy her out, but also with the concerns of each of the twelve named characters, including those whom another dramatist might treat as marginal. As directed by Frances Viner at the Stables theatre this sense of a vulnerable interdependence was very strong.
Madam Ranevskaya (Rachel McCarron) and her brother Gayev (Patrick Kealey) promenade
The production offered two strong central performances from Rachel McCarron’s Ranevskaya, all manic, neurotic energy and poignant loss, and Max Hastings as Lopakhin, the peasant boy turned successful businessman. His considerable stage presence showed us not an unimaginative boor but a man confused and conflicted. Around them swirled the pain and needs of family, friends, servants. With a single speech by Charlotta Ivanovna, the governess (Sally Ann Lycett) – her fairground childhood, her longing to know who she is, to have someone to listen to her story – Chekhov offers enough material for a novel. The characters boasted, wept, bumped into the furniture, confided, agonised over the future of society. These lives were intermeshed. What would happen to them when the curtain closes on the abandoned house and on Firs (Anne Edwards), the forgotten ancient retainer?
Unexpectedly, my strongest memory of the production is of chairs. True to the ensemble nature of the production, all actors remained on stage throughout, seated at the edges when not speaking centre stage. At the beginning of the play Varya (Lise Boucon) angry, yearning for the proposal from Lopakhin which never materialises places a number of chairs centre stage. In their near constant shifts, we are given a physical sense of relationships: closeness and intimacy, distance and indifference. And the scene which opened the play’s second half, the ball with its music and dancing, was here presented as a game of musical chairs, the players in paper party hats fashioned on stage, parading, flirting, searching for that necessary space, dropping exhausted. Leaving us with the questions: in this world, coming into being as the trees in the cherry orchard fall, who will be left without a chair, without a means of living?
Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard showed at The Stables Theatre from 12-20 April 2024
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply