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The orchard
Director: Sergey Ovcharov
Producers:
Andrey Sigle
Dmitry Svetozarov
This is a new version of the “Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov. In our opinion, it comes up to the author’s message as close as possible. The author was utterly unsatisfied by the production of this play in his lifetime.
In letters he wrote: “My play goes now, I don’t wait a particular success, business is rotten”. “Yesterday there was my play, that is why I am off my feed” or “Does “The Cherry Orchard” up till then is mine “Cherry Orchard”?...
All of this is not mine really, this is a humdrum ordinary existence, but not a tiresome whimpering, makes me either sniveller or simply a boring writer, and I wrote several tomes of jolly stories. But criticism puts me in some sort of wailers!”
Chekhov truely considered his play a jolly comedy, vaudeville and was surprised that directors and critics persistently considered it to be a drama. Current version of “The Cherry Orchard” in the “oppressive clowning” style.
But Chekhov’s play bears a strong resemblance by its structure to legendary Italian "comedia del arte", with its Pierrot, Columbine, doctor Pantaloon and others.
Chekhov and “comedia del arte”, has its sirs mixed, because of the superfluous aristocratism, they boast of this (even without a penny to bless oneself with), permanently speaking about “lofty topics”, not being bearers of this.
Their people imitating sirs, were left without surveillance, always create clownery, recaptures, pantomimes, pazzo. These pazzo look like humorous stunts of the eccentric comedy film–burlesque of Buster Keaton and a great Chaplin.
Del arte, in a film-burlesque and Chekhov have similar images, types, “masks”.
How much there is in landowner Gaev from Pantaloon. How much there is in Chekhov’s “clowns” like Pierrot-Epihodov and ex-clown Harlequin-Charlotte from Fellini. And valet Firs – isn’t he a dying but making everyone laugh old man, Harlequin?
”Cherry Orchard” of A.Chekhov – is a lofty comedy. A laugh through tears and tears through a laugh. About lofty, panhuman, about humanism was told subtly psychologically, perceptionally, mischievously and spectacularly.
Here a circus actor, performing dog, somersault, tricks, esophageal speech (Fellini again) and creaky boots of “circus clown”, but with it “a genius of the place” – Epihodov. A comedic deafness, blindness and decrepit state of Firs.
Heroes of “The Cherry Orchard” cry a lot, but they laugh and play tricks even more, as typical gardeners. In a day, when their garden, their love and pain, is being sold, they laugh heartly and dance! Almost all of them are beggary, both sirs and their people, but big money always manipulate their consciousness, like a skilful puppeteer manipulates comic marionettes.
In a new performance of the “Cherry Orchard” there are no supporting roles. Though the central character is a valet Firs, forgotten by sirs in the finale and doomed to the death in a closed, empty house. In a garden workers cut the trees, but Firs does not call for help, does not ask to unloose. He intentionally alone, as captain, plumbs with his sinking “ship”.
Firs’s maternal care about his children-sirs, his renunciation from personal life for the sir’s sake (he didn’t get married) in the name of his “profession” – to care and be emotionally involved with others. Here is a clue of the “Cherry Orchard”. Firs is not a lackey already, he is a “father-mother”, as he feels himself, and there is enough for it.
Only Firs was devoted to the “Cherry Orchard” and house. Audience thinks that he was forgotten. But Firs has a different opinion. He doesn’t want to be a burden to his “children-sirs” with utterly burdensome care of his infirmity, and accepts death. Here is his main life’s “concerning exploit”.
All other heroes also are good people. Although their “little” weaknesses outbalanced. All of them could not stand the faithfulness test to their “Paradise” – orchard garden and house. More than that, damaged their Eden, and with it its custodian (so similar with Saint Peter). They even left it with relief. Now there is no need to grieve to “my worn out soul” (as it was in their romances sang) neither at the garden, nor at the house, nor at those they tamed.
A melodramatic, cruel-romantic, comic sketched constituent, slily embedded by Chekhov in a play’s structure is important for us. All heroes love each other “in one way”, with no mutuality. Everyone has its unanswered love. In each soul a dream about money fights with a dream about love. Only Firs has a true harmony. He is happy. He found his mental equilibrium. His wealth: it is in love and in service one’s neighbour. Everyone chuckles at him, without suspecting that he is the one, who is “blessed as poor in spirit”.
A new version of the “Cherry Orchard” is that only a true, not a sham, spirituality and a life-asserting laugh will save the human being. Authors of the film are going to maintain this without edification, humdrum, in music and plastic, in clownery, pantomime, and circus. In a word, in spectacular, entertaining form, whereof in due time invoked the interpreters of his play, Anton Chekhov.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION |
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