The Whole of Italy Is Our Orchard: Strehler's Cherry Orchard

The Whole of Italy Is Our Orchard: Strehler's Cherry Orchard PIA KLEB ER Giorgio Strehler called Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard a masterpiece, an example of the best that bourgeois society has left us.' In 1974 Strehler embarked on his second production of the play, having been dissatisfied with his first staging in 1955. Both productions were presented at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Like Peter Stein, who subsequently directed The Cheny Orchard in Berlin for the Schaubtihne am Lehniner Platz (1989), Strehler did extensive research on previous Chekhov productions, and both directors took as the starting point for the development of their respective concepts Stanislavsky 's initial 1904 staging of the play. However, different cultures, theatre histories, and social and political situations generated diametrically opposed transpositions of Chekhov's dramatic text onto the stage. Strehler explained in Un theatre pour ta vie that his theatre attempts "to shape the contour of a new reality" by "engendering doubts and asking questions " and by "demystifying pseudo-problems,'" thereby chaUenging the spectator to commit himself to a specific social identity and political perspective . Recognizing the correlation between a historical revolution and the magical transformation that occurs in the theatre, Strehler intimated the vital role that the theatre plays in directing concrete, political changes in the world. In order to achieve this goal, a direcror has to liberate the author he is staging from the captivity of his own time. As Mikhail Bakhtin asserts in an essay of the 1970s, trying "to understand and explain a work solely in terms of the conditions of the most immediate time will never enable us to penetrate into its semantic depths."3 Even though Strehler emphasized his debt to Stanislavsky's staging of The Cherry Orchard, he was also conscious that he had to disentangle Chekhov from Stanislavsky and present the play not as a serious social drama about Russian life but as a mise en scene that "must pass through the here and now, the hie et nunc."4 For Strehler, "here and now" did not necessarily require a Modern Drama, 42 (Winter 1999) 579 580 PIA KLEBER modernization of the play, nor was he thinking of the actual moment when the actor played the role on stage, but he did intend to isolate the precise historical moment when the spectators are engaged in the spectacle. To engage the spectator successfully. one must establish a common cultural code, since a theatrical text "exists only in the audience's presence," as Erika Fischer-Lichte says in her book The Semiotics ofTheater. "To the extent that both producers and receivers are members of the same culture, they will, like all members of that culture, share the cultural background of this culture."5 This article will examine what cultural sources Strehler tapped to make The Cherry Orchard relevant to his Italian audience and what elements of the staging can be specifically attributed to Strehler's directorial art. One is immediately struck by the blinding whiteness that envelops the stage and becomes a leitmotif for Strehler's production of The Cheny Orchard: a white rectangul.ar stage floor, surrounded by a white cyclorama, furniture covered with white sheets, except for one chair and an old white annoire, and above everything a white veil, holding hundreds of petals, extending into the auditorium. The white-an-white decor will soon be peopled with figures dressed in all shades of white, from the bright white dress of Anya to the dirty white habit of Lopakhin. Only the black costumes of the servants, Firs and the parlourmaid Dunyasha, punctuate the whiteness.6 Acts One and Four are played in the nursery, the former children's room of Lyubov and Gayev, which has been kept in its original form. The first thing Lyubov does, upon returning home after a five-year absence in Paris, is to crawl under the sheets and uncover the two white children's desks, a small table, and three little chairs. She immediately starts playing with the toys and drinking espresso out of her childhood coffee service, as if she wanted to breathe life into the past and unite it with the present. And in the last act the...