With three beloved friends, I sat in the intimate environment of the National Theatre in London last Saturday night to watch one of Anton Chekhov’s great plays, The Cherry Orchard – the story of Mrs Ranevsky and Anya, her daughter, struggle to come to terms with the impending loss of their family estate owing to family debts.
You have to watch and listen rather intently to a Chekhov play since it generates a climate of insecurity, dashes of humour, despair and plurality of differences of view about what to do. The plot in a Chekhov play serves as a second string to the ongoing dialogue between the actors (superbly played at the National Theatre) who instil pathos, anguish, futility and longing for redemption into the characters.
Mother and daughter get back from Paris to find out that this landholding family must sell off the estate. A family friend, Lopahkin, a former serf, who has become a wealthy landowner, suggests they cut down the cherry orchard and build holiday cottages on it to rent out. The family rejects the suggestion.
As the play moves along, the audience develops a sense that Chekhov reveals a metaphor for the aspirations, ambitions and struggle of the rich, poor and middle classes with their fears and hopes for the present and future.
In a gripping polemic from the “eternal student,” Trofimov shares his revolutionary ideas with the beautiful Anya, aged 17, who, consequently, finds it easy to let go of her childhood home and romantic associations with the past and realise her independence.
Trofimov said to her: “All Russia is our orchard. The earth is so wide, so beautiful, so full of wonderful places.
Just think, Anya. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather and all your ancestors owned serfs, they owned human souls. Don’t you see that from every cherry-tree in the orchard, from every leaf and every trunk, men and women are gazing at you?
“If we’re to start living in the present isn’t it abundantly clear that we’ve first got to redeem our past and make a clean break with it? And we can only redeem it by suffering and getting down to real work for a change.”
Changes in social standing become apparent when Lopahkin buys the property at the auction drawing delight at owning the estate where his grandfather and father had once been slaves.
With a typical Chekhov flourish, the play ends with the faithful servant becoming locked into an empty and abandoned house and the sound of the axe chopping down the cherry orchard.
Written in 1904, the Cherry Garden is Chekhov’s last play. He died soon after aged 44. His play still stands true more than a century later. Unresolved issues around debts, indecisiveness in the family, a changing social order, nostalgia for the past and destruction of land still dominate much human thought.