Mihaela Lovin

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

mihaelalovin@clujnapoca.ro

 

 

The Cherry Orchard in Soviet Rereading

 

 

Abstract: Our study explores the Soviet period of Chekhov’s play, focusing on the radical change in the rhythm and perception of the Chekhovian universe after the year 1917. Furthermore, it seeks to outline the Soviet directors’ solutions either for the political rereading of the play or for the prevention of the ideological contamination of The Cherry Orchard. The study concerns the best-known productions of Chekhov’s play during the Soviet era, from Stanislavsky’s post-revolutionary performance to Anatoli Efros’s Shakespearian staging.

Keywords: The Soviet Union; A. P. Chekhov; The Cherry Orchard; K. S. Stanislavsky; V. I. Meyerhold; A. M. Lobanov; Maria Knebel; Anatoly Efros.

 

 

A final, testamentary play, The Cherry Orchard is the result of a meticulous refinement of Chekhov’s previous writing, a composition including, according to the criteria of representativeness, the structural and material accumulations of the Chekhovian theatrical experiments up to 1904. The representativeness at the textual level, as well as the director’s challenge – the stage reading of a play having one of the most sinuous histories – activates the frequency of the productions of The Orchard and, therefore, its establishment as the Chekhovian work with the highest interpretive availability. However, concomitant with the history of stage reading charts, we observe the writing of the history of the solutions provided by the Chekhovian staging to the political aspects contained in The Cherry Orchard. The possibility of the credibility of extremely distinct answers is favoured by an indisputable symptom of Chekhov’s modernity: the lack of morality in The Cherry Orchard, the absence of the urge to instruct, the crushing of final answers. The equivocal nature of social connotations in Chekhov’s play will also draw imputations of disinterest against the author during the post-revolutionary period and will favour even more, during the Soviet era, the mutilation of his testamentary play on political grounds.

During both periods, the auctorial ambiguity amplifies the ideological contradictions and, implicitly, the conflictive potential of a play in which the conflict is blurred, almost lacking. In the pre-revolutionary stage reading of The Cherry Orchard, the political touches are mediated not only by the social context of the beginning of the century, but they seem to infiltrate through the director’s choice of a certain cast. Since Stanislavsky rejects Lopahkin’s role in favour of Gaev’s, and the Art Theatre does not have an elderly actress able to undertake a role such as Ranevskaya’s, the brotherly couple in The Cherry Orchard is performed by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper. In the absence of a more appropriate solution, Lopahkin’s role will be assigned to L. M. Leonidov. The director’s choice touches on both Chekhov’s concern with the actor’s inability to render the discrepancies intrinsic to the new type of merchant, and the general suspicion that Leonidov would risk turning The Cherry Orchard into a mourning of the Gaevs’ fate. Furthermore, the casting of The Orchard’s premiere also creates the perfect setting for admitting on the stage the remains of star adulation; it rallies, at the beginning of the century, the audience’s sympathy for Stanislavsky and Knipper and, thus, for Gaev and Ranevskaya, for the tragic dispossession of aristocracy, and for the fervour of the new existence. Since “Stanislavsky as Gaev and Knipper as Ranevskaya, both tending to idealise their parts, direct the audience’s sympathy towards the dislocated aristocracy”[1], on the premiere of Chekhov’s play, the spectators see Ranevskaya’s family as “sacrifice[d] by mercantile vulgarity”; they look at the disappearance of the domain “through its owners’ eyes”[2] and, thus, overstate one of the most ambiguous conflicts.

Over time, together with the rehabilitation of Stanislavsky’s production and the putting into perspective of the so-called naturalist Stanislavskyan error, the tendentiousness of the first staging of The Cherry Orchard is questioned[3]. However, the aspects not considered concern the tendency of the Chekhovian audience at the beginning of the century to join the Gaevs’ fate and relate the sudden transfer of sympathy to the political criteria following 1917 to Petya Trofimov’s revolutionary enthusiasm. Thus, whereas during the period of perfect harmony between the playwright and the Stanislavskyan theatrical institution, “Chekhov’s plays were being staged, played and seen by those who were «Chekhovian» themselves”[4], the spectators of the first post-revolutionary years will either perceive the mise-en-scène of the Art Theatre as the final artistic performance of their own past or detect the incompatibility of the play with the dominant ideology and the inadequacy of the juxtaposition of Stanislavsky’s vision to aristocratic parasitism. The new audience, proletarian in principle, unaware of the realities in The Cherry Orchard, tends to object to the non-adaptation of Stanislavsky’s performance to the modification of rhythm required by the new political background and to the mandatory change of aesthetic taste enforced by A. V. Lunacearski’s reforms during October 1920. The founding of the new art on the criticism of the bourgeois past and the purification of the canonical works from the vestiges of decadence denote, for Stanislavsky’s performance, the shift of accent from the Gaevs’ aristocratic-decadent ideology to Trofimov’s utopian-revolutionary one. In fact, the Stanislavskyan Cherry Orchard is as politically ambiguous as Chekhov’s play, slightly nostalgic for the times when the orchard would be profitable and the trips to Paris would be made for pleasure.

Escape from the neglect area under which the new realities had placed Stanislavsky’s performance emerges in the form of the tour of the Art Theatre during 1922-1924. The exile of the performance will not only familiarise the West European, Northern and American audience with the works of the pre-revolutionary past, but will also manage to canonise the naturalist version of The Cherry Orchard for more than five decades in the Occidental history of the Chekhovian play. This is also the time during which Nemirovich-Dancenko and Stanislavsky arrive at believing in the impossibility of re-staging, in the Soviet realm, a “lament for the aristocracy’s lost lands”[5], but also at believing in the chance the availability of sociological interpretations of the play would provide to the continuance of its stage existence.

Bound to save the theatre that had associated its name to Chekhovian dramaturgy, Stanislavsky engages in discovering another Chekhov, fitting the reading chart of an era vulnerable to the heritage of the past. Giving in to the aesthetic mutations, to the Marxist criticism attacks, assuming, in the end, Lenin’s protection provided to a cultural institution of the past and, implicitly, the museum-like nature of the Art Theatre, Stanislavsky chooses the adaptation of the play whose last performance had taken place in 1917, in view of restaging it in 1928. In order to persuade the Soviet audience that The Cherry Orchard is “a living, close, contemporary play; that Chekhov’s voice echoes within it powerfully, fervently” and that Chekhov “does not look behind, but ahead”, Stanislavsky approaches a perspective compatible with the rhythm of history, conceiving a performance in which Lopahkin “should strike with all his strength in the vestiges of the past”, whereas Anya, “apprehending, together with Petya Trofimov the proximity of a new epoch, should shout at the entire world «Long live the new life!”[6]. The outcome of the Stanislavskyan compromise is seen in the fact that revisionism, according to political criteria, “alters the essence of the Art Theatre, so that time itself adjusts the ‘atmosphere’ of The Cherry Orchard”[7]. However, despite the change of rhythm, despite the removal of the breaks and the sliding from the elegiac level to the optimistic one, Stanislavsky’s production from 1928 is still filled, for the spectators, with traces of the past and the “odour of the cemetery”[8].

Surprisingly, instead of discrediting the Chekhovian play, the failure of Stanislavsky’s rereading renders equally visible the possibility of a social-political rereading of The Cherry Orchard. Soviet Russia detects in the work of the bourgeois past the opportunity of a “reinterpretation, even of an approach of Chekhov, in order to make him relevant to the new era”[9]. Modified in a propagandistic direction, the theme of The Cherry Orchard becomes “the expression of the disappearance of the bourgeois-landlord class and the increase of the kulak capital”[10] while attention shifts from the couple Ranevskaya-Gaev to those seen as the romantics of the new regime, Anya and Trofimov. The orchard is enthusiastically destroyed, under the feeling of historical justice, which turns Ranevskaya and Gaev into parasites of the old system, and Lopahkin into a half-measure vigilante, whose practical spirit and energy were needed by the proletarian state[11].

Whereas until the ’30s, the productions, coeval with the Stanislavskyan vision, would follow the chart established by the Art Theatre, the occasion of the radical readings in an ideological key is provided by the 1935 anniversary moment. Celebrating 75 years since Chekhov’s birth, the anniversary context creates the ground favourable either to the defensive strategies made from the preferential staging of the Chekhovian vaudevilles, or to the obvious rereading in a realist-socialist key. Whereas V. I. Meyerhold insists on avoiding interpretable Chekhovian texts, opting for a compilation-script from the vaudevilles The Bear, The Jubilee and The Proposal, A. M. Lobanov selects form the poly-semantics of the Chekhovian play the radical revisionism implied by a predetermined sociologic reading chart. Starting from A. M. Gorki’s considerations, who would see in Chekhov’s play the expression of aristocratic egoism and parasitism on account of Varia’s exhaustion, A. M. Lobanov says that the theme of the play is “the material and moral degeneration of the aristocracy of the end of the century and their substitution by the commercial and industrial capital”, while the idea of the performance is that “all that is decayed dies without finding compassion…”[12].

In support of the director’s goals, the scenographer Boris Matrunin brings on the stage of Simov’s Studio Theatre the image of a land property entirely purged of beauty. In order to prevent any nostalgic outburst and to question the landlords’ intimacy with the space threatened, “the rooms were angular”, the furniture wore “the mark of negligence and anachronism”, Act II was completely deprived of landscape and of any trace of the orchard, the symbolic spaces being replaced by cheap bars and public toilets where Trofimov gave conspiratorial speeches[13].

In addition to the scenographer’s changes, Lobanov’s mise-en-scène simplifies the character’ psychology and reconfigures the relational web of Chekhov’s play, naming it “a revision of each and every character” and “critical approach of the inter-relations”. Ranevskaya turns into an egocentric and promiscuous aristocrat (as noted by Laurence Senelick, Lobanov’s Ranevskaya is a “«fundamentally impure» version”[14]), clearly involved in a relationship with servant Yasha and lacking any affection for the future owner of the orchard. Lopahkin becomes the plunderer “at times concealing under the mask of goodness”, whose perspective of marrying Varia is set from the beginning “under the star of derision”. By amplification, Gaev becomes “a self-sufficient” “chatterbox” “who has wasted his wealth on candies”, whereas Pishcik is a “fallen noble who has lost his human appearance”[15]. Despite its conformity with the realist-socialist vision, Lobanov’s staging of the play will not be excused from controversy. The charges of distorting the classic, of negating the cultural heritage, of adopting a vulgar sociological approach will not prevent, however, the new Cherry Orchard from appearing for many years in the repertoire of Simov’s Studio Theatre, owing to its penchant for innovation and re-writing gallantry.

Whereas during the first forty years of Soviet Russia, the attitude toward Chekhov is formulated in terms of consistency with Stanislavsky or with the dominant ideology, the period near World War II overshadows both the version of the Art Theatre and the ideologised readings of The Cherry Orchard[16]. Starting with the ’60s, the Russian directors come close to the Chekhovian creation either on account of the reading of the perpetual values, of beauty ruined by pragmatism and of family values, home, tradition or on account of the author’s full canonisation, which relates him to the historical past, making him harmless with respect to the new values, of the present times.

The illustration of the former motivation is M. O. Knebel’s anti-realist performance in 1965, at the Army Theatre in Moscow. Wanting to distance herself definitively both from Stanislavskyan naturalism and from Chekhov’s ideological rereading, the director chooses an essentialised scenography, a predecessor of Giorgio Strehler’s abstract reading. Under Maria Knebel’s direction, in the absence of any tree and of any branch at the window, “one would have the feeling that a splendid orchard in blossom would lie ahead”, while “the beauty of the curtain folds would be breathtaking”[17], recalling the fact that “life flutters similar to them, back and forth, lacking any practical purpose”[18]. Believing that “each of us has lost or will lose their own «cherry orchard»”[19], M. O. Knebel ignores the characters’ class adherence, for the benefit of the human dimension of Chekhov’s heroes. Her choice ensures preventing lending a political appearance to The Cherry Orchard and, simultaneously, the opportunity to render the audience members responsive, irrespective of their social background. In this manner, in Maria Knebel’s staging, “the characters are interesting not because of their social status, commercial or aristocratic class, but because of their human traits: they are merely fascinating people”[20].

Despite the aestheticising nature that should have neutralised any potential polemics, the 1965 Cherry Orchard will also meet its criticism. During the era of a realist Chekhov, the dramatic world of the post-war years is surprised both by the gravity, symbolism and diligent personification in the staging at the Moscow Army Theatre, and by the reductionism implied by a reading indifferent to the sociological implications of the play. Hence, the floating curtains, which “create not the image, but the memorabilia of an orchard and of the life associated to it”,[21] arrive at not balancing the dispossession of The Orchard of a great part of the depth contained by its poly-semantics[22].

Several years after Maria Knebel’s antirealist staging, the Russian theatre initiates an authentic campaign for the rediscovery of Chekhovian dramaturgy, a campaign prepared, however, by the careful antirealist experiments during the first years of the sixth decade. This time, Chekhov is to be discovered not as a representative of the post-revolutionary past, but as an author addressing, in an equally competent manner, the present. Furthermore, assisted by the thaw in the Soviet society of the ’70s, “the triumph over the complexity of The Cherry Orchard is censored by the limitations on the Russian theatre following Prague 1968. The consequences in the social plan of the notorious invasion are, in fact, the source of the return of the Russian theatre to the staging of the classic authors, a defensive strategy, through which the directors may express “their frustrations with respect to the limitations of the Soviet world”[23].

The most resounding presentation of the period and the most capable of avoiding the disapproval of the Soviet world is the 1985 Cherry Orchard, at the Theatre na Taganke. The director Anatoly Efros finds the outlet that allows him to prevent ideological contamination through an unprecedented revisionism, meant to bring on the stage of Yuri Lyubimov’s theatrical institution the metaphysical level, the grotesque dimension and the Shakespearian inter-text of Chekhov’s play. For the anti-realist theatre that Taganka had been during the ’70s, the preference of the guest-director for a canonical author adds to the originality of Efros’s rereading the eccentricity of his choice of Chekhov. In a “theatre in which Chekhov seems unconceivable”, “where there are always empty brick walls”, and “the artists display their heroes in Brechtian manner”, the truth, from Efros’s perspective, “must be sought for only in the contrasts”, in the tragic mise-en-scène of Gogol’s comedy, in the Chekhovian manner of Brecht’s staging or in the anti-realist context of a “theatre that knows the least «the Chekhovian tone»”[24].

Believing both in the distance between the auctorial intentions and the staging of a perpetually different Chekhov, a Chekhov of the time of staging[25], and in the legitimacy of re-readings, irrespective of their degree of radicalism, Efros will bring on the stage of Taganka surprising answers to the genre and style issues and, unavoidably, to the political one. Since he rejects the elegiac Stanislavskyan reading, perceiving in Chekhov’s plays the concealed points to certain tragedies, Efros’s mission focuses on bringing to the surface the dissonant touches, the extreme experiences hidden in the subtext of the Chekhovian play. He accomplishes this by a subversion assumed both toward the Soviet theatre and toward the canonical text, providing justification through the temporal distance from the time when the situational complexity in The Cherry Orchard would put on stage contemporary realities: “I sought to amplify the dramatic moment – Efros confesses – even the tragic one. Yes, I knew that Chekhov had considered this play to be a comedy. In fact, it is possible that Chekhov said this because the spectacle at the Art Theatre had been excessively lyric, perhaps even sentimental. Of course, from his point of view. Now, reading The Cherry Orchard, I can prove that it is a tragedy, even if almost concealed under the form of a farce. But I have particularly focused on a rough tragic. I cannot stage The Cherry Orchard as it has been previously staged. Not in the manner in which the Art Theatre has done it, nor in the manner in which Chekhov recommended it. I can only stage it in the manner in which I feel it now”[26]. In the performance, the result of such a belief will mark the alert rhythm of Efros’s Orchard, bringing together particularities of the tragedy and some of the roughest farce elements. In James N. Loehlin’s words, Efros associates “grotesque tragedy” and “psychological farce”, Stanislavsky, Brecht and Meyerhold, in a performance in which the actors easily go from “immersion in the part” to the “full separation”[27], from dissonant emotional tonalities and echoes to the indifference that gives them a puppet-like, mechanical appearance.

Inspired by a neurotic energy, Alla Demidova’s Ranevskaya obscures her awareness of the fatal diagnosis on the orchard under this uncontainable dynamics at the origin of the unexpected mood changes, from the hysterical desolation of recalling the dead son to the attempt of flirting with Trofimov, from the apparent impassibility preceding the question on the sale of the property to the most acute hysteria upon finding out the news, sudden crosses from “Chekhov’s piano to Efros’s forte”[28]. In line with the medical comparisons implied by the situational complex of The Cherry Orchard (the land diagnosis, made known from the first act, mentioned by Efros[29], waiting for the auction similar to waiting for the end of an operation which the patient does not survive, mentioned by the actress Alla Demidova[30]) the director’s strategy, based on contrast, takes over the generic option from Efros’s mise-en-scène on account of the similarity between these curves and life itself: “When we look at a cardiogram lacking fluctuation – Efros says – this means there is no life. The fluctuations are the life.”[31]

Furthermore, believing in the impossibility of a definite separation between the Stanislavskyan method and the Meyerholdian one, Efros brings together the lyricism of the 1904 premiere and the mystical-symbolist key in which Meyerhold would read The Cherry Orchard at the beginning of the century. For a scenography what would combine the poetical, the comical and the grotesque, the director sits under the counter-current of Taganka’s scenography preference, using the same setting on stage, during all the four acts. This is a synthesising image of life and death: a cemetery-hill thick with crosses, tombstones, miniature fittings and cherry trees, a memento mori in the form of an immense pillow with its fringes in sight, a reference to the Shakespearian “To die, to sleep…” As seen by the scenographer Valeri Levental, the group of Chekhovian characters hustled together between the crosses is an ironic version of Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead, greeting Efros’s intent of bringing on stage “a moribund generation of the bizarre”, “a small, unhappy, helpless flock”[32], a group of clowns taken from Fellini’s films[33].

Since he undertakes the mission of “showing in the theatre to the Soviet intelligentsia the life and its particularities”[34], Efros rejects the museum-like nature of The Cherry Orchard, dealing with Chekhov’s play in the terms of a contemplation on time and, also, of a parable on the rejection of reality. “Life – Efros believes – is a swirl and people cannot defy this swirl. We are weaker than the swirl named time”[35]. Subject to the humour of temporality, the director puts at the centre of this “carrousel of the lost souls”[36] Ranevskaya’s tragic figure and Lopahkin’s, the former on a throne recalling King Lear’s irresponsible abdication, the latter in perpetual movement, restless as a winner and, at the same time, as a loser. Hence, the rejection of the naturalist representation of the orchard (with the exception of the trees out of place amongst the graves and of the cherry tree branch descending from the ceiling) is explained by the fact that “the significations and its destiny are written on people’s faces”[37].

In support of the on-stage setting of Meyerhold’s orchard pattern, the director calls upon Alla Demidova’s and Vladimir Vysotsky’s white costumes, as well as the grotesque effect cast upon the play by the prologue and epilogue represented by Epikhodov’s song. Whereas the costumes help Efros outline the symbolist dimension and Ranevskaya’s identification with the orchard, Epikhodov is the means of drawing attention on the puppet show and on the limitations in the Soviet world. Holding the revolver as a microphone, Epikhodov draws consideration on the constant threat in Russia during the ’70s and heralds Ranevskaya’s visceral response upon finding out the result of the auction. As one of the most physiological of the landlady’s possible reactions, Alla Demidova’s reaction overwhelms owing to its resemblance to the reaction of the victims of physical tortures: she pants and falters, as if raked by bullets, she gasps hoarsely and, several times, she bends convulsively “as if she had been hit in the womb”[38].

After he had “behaved like a doctor trying to tell his unreasonable patients that there was a plague outside and that they had to get a grip on themselves and take action”[39], Vladimir Vysotsky chuckles noisily and grossly like a mujik who has just been liberated, violently, sincerely, delivering his winsome monologue like his own banned poems, stretching the words and then letting them drop unexpectedly. In the manner recalled by Rimma Krecetova, “«Can’t you play any louder? Louder!» he would shout, almost choking, jumping greedily, trying to grab a blossomed cherry tree branch”[40]. Emerging in one of the successful rehearsals, “When Vysotsky appeared to have erased the border between he and the character”[41], Lopakhin’s jumps contrast brutally with Ranevskaya’s elegance, slowness and Parisian decadence.

Propped by the anti-ideological allusions in dealing with the characters of Ranevskaya and Epikhodov, the political subversion of Efros’s mise-en-scène is the more obvious in Trofimov’s approach. Apart from the fact that the director’s sympathy seems to concern the tragic figures in the foreground, Taganka’s performance places ambiguity over the missionarism of the perpetual student. Efros’s Trofimov does not hold the supreme truth that had belonged to Lobanov, but rather a being equally ridiculous as Epikhodov, an enthusiast who, “like Lopakhin, searches agonizingly for a solution”: “Petya –Efros writes – is like a schoolteacher. Time passes by and when you look, the teacher is already used and somewhat comical. We have a good historian, some girls would say, it’s only that it is him we laugh at. Someone even tripped him once and the teacher fell. Although, if you ask each of them, they will say: we had a good schoolteacher”[42].

Placed under the sign of the subversion of the canonical and, at the same time, of the Stanislavskyan method of staging The Cherry Orchard, Efros’s show is, thus, equally subversive against the reading of Chekhov in an ideological key. To the charges of exaggeration, simplification or distortion he opposes the director’s obligation to pull out the subliminal ideas of the canonical play and to put on stage their own Chekhov who “should rival Shakespeare in the tragic plan, the theatre of the absurd in the plan of the ruthlessly comical”[43].

For the directors of the twenty-first century, the distortion of The Cherry Orchard, its filtering, for seven decades, through the political reading grid, has rendered more visible the risks of a tendentious reading. This leads to the affinity for caution in the approach of the sociological dimension of contemporary re-readings, which would rather focus on the idea of change, on the tension between past and future inscribed in the Chekhovian text, on the “myth of lost opportunities, of frustrating dreams and of fragile hopes”[44]. In other words, using the words of a spectator who has seen both the versions that were politically mutilated or in search of openings, and those ideologically purged, “it’s been long since, in Trofimov’s words, each ‘cherry tree’, each ‘leaf’, each ‘trunk’ in the Gaevs’ orchard came alive only by the landlords’ injustice relating to the peasant and by the disappearance of the domain. Nowadays, we are touched, in this play, apart from the dramatic events, precisely by the people caught in their swirl, by the ability of these events to address universal human values, modulations of the human soul”[45]. It is the aspect that, given the impossibility of preventing answers, be they partial, to the issues of genre, style and politics, is allowed to be perceived in the contemporary Cherry Orchards, plays about sadness and joy, people and objects, children and elders, change and stillness, triumphs and defeats.

 

 

References

Allen, David, Performing Chekhov, Routledge, London and New York, 2000.

Efros, Anatoly, Professia: rezhisser (Profession: Director), preface by Aleksand Kaleaghin, Panas, Moscow, 1993, www.da.stranichka.net

Gottlieb, Vera, Allain, Paul (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

Krecetova, Rimma,“Vladimir Vysotsky”, Teatr, No. 1, 2005, pp. 24-28.

Loehlin, James N., Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard, Cambridge University Press, series «Plays in Production», Cambridge, 2006.

Poloţkaia, E. A., «Vishnjovyj sad». Zhyzn’ vo vremeni (“The Cherry Orchard”. Evolution in Time), Nauka, Moscow, 2004.

Rudniţki, K. L., Teatral’nye siuzhety (Theatrical Subjects), Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1990.

Salnikova, Ecaterina,“On iz teh, kto sozdaval epohu. 75 let Anatoliyu Efrosu” (“He ranges amongst those who have configured the epoch. Anatoli Efros. 75 years”), Cultura, 3 June 2004, www.kulturagz.ru

Smeliansky, Anatoly, The Russian Theatre after Stalin, translated by Patrick Miles, foreword by Laurence Senelick, Cambridge Unversity Press, Cambridge, 1999.

Stanislavsky, K.I., Sobraniye socinenii v 9 tomah (Complete Works in 9 volumes), vol. I, Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1988.

Teatr Anatoliya Efrosa, M. G. Zaionţ, Moscow, 2000.

Zapadnoe iskusstvo XX veka, Gosudarstvennyj Institut Iskusstvoznanija. Dmitri Bulanin, Sankt-Petersburg, 2001.

 

 

Notes