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JanetSuzman’sTheFreeStatewasconceivedintheSouthAfrica of apartheid. In this national context, in a harsher version of the scientific “bads”of Beck’s risk society, science and technology were frequently used asrepressivetools:lifedestruction,surveillance,socialcontrol,andthekind of torturethataccountsfor Leko’sdamagedhands,whichhewavesaround “too much” in Suzman’s play. The Free State has not yet been performed in South Africa, but it was conceived there in a theatre struggling for an alternativeSouthAfricanpolitics.TheplayhastwiceruninBritain,which, cultural contexts theatrical event, liminality, and risk in the free state The theatrical event must be understood as a process as much as it is a happening. . . . Every theatrical event has a socio-political aspect, both in relation to its content and in the way it is presented. —Willmar Sauter I started off from act 2 because I was wanting to politicize the play in the sense of setting it in another political atmosphere, another political event, which is postrevolutionary South Africa. Acts 1, 3, and 4 are, if you like, in a generalized sense about letting go, trying to stamp out nostalgia, trying to disembarrass yourself of possessions, all of which carry resonances of an old order of apartheid, of that sort of possessiveness. But act 2 postulates another world. . . . It’s immensely striking how strongly Chekhov feels about the stranger in act 2, for example. The stranger is one of the people from out there, and that is what I wanted my stranger to be as well—the people who are not in this charmed circle of those living in the house. So really, it was from act 2 that the web of political changes that affected Trofimov and Lopakhin had their beginnings for me. —Janet Suzman, personal interview, June 2000 7 at the turn of the twenty-first century, was still facing its own deep racist violence.At the time of playing The Free State, overt racism was evident in British streets, on football terraces, in prison cells (where racist murders still occurred), and even within the British Muslim religion. In research interviews I conducted at this time (Tulloch and Lupton 2003), firstgeneration migrants to Britain spoke about racism and risk, sometimes agreeing that things are getting better on the surface but that there were covert,indirectriskstofacenow.Thereweretheriskof one’schildrengrowing up too fast in their mixed-race schools (drugs and violence were a current worry here),and there was what Beck calls“risky underemployment” as first-generation migrants whose economy had been based on familyrun corner shops and small business were squeezed out by supermarkets and the microelectronic revolution. The Cherry Orchard is,of course,abouteconomicrisk,primarilyto the “outmoded”Russian gentry class at the turn of the twentieth century.But it details also the economic, social, and personal risks of other classes in that process: of the “underclass” stranger who storms on to the scene amidst the philosophizing of act 2; of the old serf, Firs, who proudly remembers how he refused his freedom; of the generations of exploited serfs who, Trofimov tells Anya, stare out from her cherry trees.Also in act 2 there are the personal and economic risks of Dunyasha, seduced and betrayed by Ranevskaya’s upwardly mobile personal servant, Yasha; of Charlotta, who has no passport, no name, no lineage, no heritage and whose fate depends entirely on the gentry for whom she is governess (and who are as adept at losing their children as they are at making losses on their estates); and indeed of Lopakhin, who loves Ranevskaya, whom he cannot have,and has the economic resources either to save or destroy her. Suzman reworks this web of class, economic, and sexual risk in the context of South African racial and ethnic risk as she draws on black actors to play most of these “at risk” roles. So act 2 of The Cherry Orchard is profoundly about risk, as Janet Suzman recognized in making it central to her theatrical setting of the Mandelan “political event.” It is also, as she says, the act where “the web of changes that affected Trofimov and Lopakhin had their beginnings.” The similarities are striking between Suzman’s concept of The Cherry Orchard as political event within the broader context of postapartheid South Africa and Trevor Griffiths’s reworking of the play to face the new conservatism of Margaret Thatcher (chapter 3). Both understood Chekhov’s play as a tension between two spaces: the inner “charmed cir220 t h e a t r i c a l e v e n t s...

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