Stanislavsky's Production Score for Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904): A Synoptic Overview

Stanislavsky's Production Score' for Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904): A Synoptic Overview NICK WORRALL In many ways, the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was the most problematic and contentious of all its efforts to stage his plays. Events surrounding the composition of the play and its staging were not propitious. Chekhov wrote it over a prolonged period during which he was an increasingly sick man; the premiere, in January 1904. was closely followed by the dramatist's death in July. What is more, Chekhov's dissatisfaction with the production was couched in tenns of frustration and anger unlike anything to be found elsewhere in his correspondence.2 The extent to which these sentiments can be attributed to his illness, rather than to real inadequacies in the interpretation, compounds the difficulties that the play and the production jointly present. Another problem relates to the nature of the play itself. There had been earlier disagreements between the Theatre and the dramatist as to the generic nature of his drama. In this case, Chekhov insisted that he had written not simply a comedy, but something more like a farce or a vaudeville.3 Stanislavsky felt that Chekhov did not understand what he had written: if the play belonged to any particular genre, he said, it was sooner that of tragedy' Disagreement about the nature of the play continued to haunt the Theatre long after Chekhov 's death. Some twenty-five years later, when his colleague NemirovichDanchenko admitted that they had not understood how Chekbov's refined realism hovered on the border of symbolism, Stanislavsky still insisted that any suggestion that the play owed a debt to Russian vaudeville could not be entertained seriously: "Just read the play and you will see that here someone weeps or speaks through tears, which is not done in a vaudeville.,,5 Nevertheless , it should not be forgotten that Chekbov's first dramatic efforts took the form of theatrical "jokes" (shutki) and that he was the author of a one-act play, The Wedding, which demonstrates a masterly handling of the comicgrotesque . These elements are detectable both in his underrated tragicomic Modem Drama, 42 (Winter 1999) SI9 520 NICK WORRALL drama, Platonov. and in the depiction of the soiree scenes on Lebedev's estate in Ivanov, not to mention the tragicomic attempted murder episode in Uncle Vanya. The characters who inhabit the dramatic world of The Cherry Orchard estate appear to have been conceived more in the one-dimensional spirit of Chekhov's earlier work than in the more "realistic" manner of The Seagull or Three Sisters. Moreover, Chekhov had become increasingly interested in the Symbolist movement towards the end of his life - a fact already apparent in the writing of The Seagull - and had encouraged the Art Theatre to look at the work of the Belgian Symbolist dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. Within a year of staging The Cluny Orchard, Stanislavsky established the experimental theatre on Povarskaya Street, where he invited Meyerhold to stage experimental productions of Symbolist drama. He himself was soon to engage in Symbolist experimentation in productions of work by Maeterlinck, Hamsun, and Andreyev. What seems surprising, in the circumstances, is that the production of The Cherry Orchard appears, according to many critics, to have avoided any manifestation of these developing influences and to have remained firmly rooted in the Art Theatre's mainstream realist tradition. This was certainly the burden of Meyerhold's critique of the production of a play he read in an overtly Symbolist, even mystical fashion,6 as did leading members of the Russian Modernist movement, Andrey Bely and Leonid Andreyev7 Equally surprising, given the evidence of .the production score, is that criticism of naturalistic excesses is on record at all, let alone Stanislavsky's view of the playas a tragedy. What would seem to emerge from the score is an intuitive sense of the play's problematic nature, hovering between realism and symbolism. An intensely felt opposition between the natural and human worlds and the relationship between the world of humans and the world of objects would appear to have exercised itself so powerfully on Stanislavsky's imagination that the fully human, three...