The Cherry Orchard, and: The Wedding (review)

In the summer of 1947, Jean Vilar opened the door to what was to become one of the largest theatre festivals in the world. Each summer, during the months of July and August, the small walled city of Avignon in Provence transforms itself into a showcase for independent theatre companies from all over the globe. A far cry from the original program of fifty years ago, which comprised three relatively traditional mainstage productions presented over one weekend, the Festival d’Avignon now boasts more than 450 different productions over a period of five weeks.

Although the Avignon festival has long included companies not indigenous to France, in the past most non-French productions appeared exclusively in the unofficial, albeit quite expansive, “off” program—as opposed to the smaller, state-sponsored, and officially advertised “in” series. Recently, however, this has begun to change, and in this, the fiftieth anniversary of the Festival d’Avignon, the “in” program featured productions by troupes from Quebec, Germany, and South Africa, as well as from the two former Soviet bloc nations Romania and Bulgaria.

Figure 1.

Charlotta (Cecile Bouillot), Varya (Anne Le Guernec), Anya (Isabelle Cagnat), Lyuba (Magali Leris), Gayev (Frederic Leidgens, and Trofimov (Arnaud Carbonnier) in the Sfumato Theatre Company of Sofia production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, adapted and directed by Marguarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobtchev, 1996 Avignon Festival. Photo: Brigitte Enguerand.

Figure 2.

Nastasya Timofeyevna (K. Savina), Dashenka (O. Joukova), and Evdokim Zhigalov (A. Chabaiev) in the Russian National Theatre of Perm production of Chekhov's The Wedding, directed by A. Savine and K. Savina, 1996 Avignon Festival. Photo: A Savine.

Clearly Anton Chekhov was one of the most favored playwrights in this year’s festival, with one mainstage “in” production, two films, a panel discussion, and three “off” stagings dedicated to his works. Two productions in particular, the “in” series’ The Cherry Orchard by the Sofia-based Sfumato Theatre in Bulgaria, and the “off” program’s The Wedding, by the Russian National Theatre of Perm, provide a perspective on the Eastern European presence at this summer’s Festival d’Avignon.

As part of the official mainstage program, Bulgarian directors Marguarita Mladenova and Ivan Dobtchev presented their adaptation of The Cherry Orchard at the Municipal Theatre in the heart of downtown Avignon. This production was a stark contrast to Peter Brook’s relatively realistic staging of the play in 1981, which has become a standing reference for French theatregoers and Chekhov enthusiasts around the world, and which received several video screenings during the festival. Rather than exploring each character’s psychological intricacies in their production, Mladenova and Dobtchev privileged a two-dimensional interpretation. Although the staging was often quite striking visually, it tended toward the extravagantly spectacular; often, the mise-en-scène overshadowed the text, and the exaggerated ironic tone of the actors frequently upstaged the basic meaning of their words.

The adaptation, written by Mladenova and translated into French by André Markowicz and Françoise Morvan, followed the original lines of the Chekhov text quite faithfully. However, most of the principal passages were rearranged or redistributed among the various scenes and acts. Mladenova’s version opened with the dialogue from Chekhov’s last act, here set on a platform at the railway station, almost an hour before the arrival of the train that would transport Lyuba and her companions away from the doomed family estate: forty-six minutes before, to be exact—as the frantic Lopakhin never ceases to remind them. The remainder of the play (Chekhov’s first, second, and third acts) was presented as a collective flashback occurring in one instant during those forty-six minutes of waiting. With a flourish of Charlotta’s magic scarf, the back of the stage opened up to reveal the...