Anton Chekhov

Chekhov stressed the comic nature of the play even as he wrote it: 'My play . . . hasn't turned out as a drama, but as a comedy, at times almost a farce' (to Olga Knipper, 15 Sept. 1903), and again, 'The last act will be gay. In fact the whole play is light and gay' (to Olga Knipper, 21 Sept. 1903). Misunderstandings arose as soon as the Moscow Art Theatre received the text. Nemirovich-Danchenko warned of an excess of tears (to Chekhov, 18 Oct. 1903), and Stanislavsky upset the author by insisting that 'this isn't a comedy or a farce as you wrote me, it's a tragedy, despite the sort of outlet towards a better life you foresee in the last act' (to Chekhov, 20 Oct. 1903). Chekhov responded with an explicit denial.

Why do you say in your telegram that my play is full of tears? Where are they? Only Varya, Varya alone, by her very nature, is a crybaby, and her tears must not promote a sense of sadness in the audience. You can often find in my plays the stage-direction 'through tears' but this points to the condition of the character and not the tears. (To Nemirovich-Danchenko, 21 Oct 1903)

Throughout the rehearsals in Moscow, Chekhov tried hard from Yalta to prevent what he considered Stanis­lavsky's excesses. When the director asked to have sound effects of a passing train, frogs and thrushes in Act Two, Chekhov headed him off: 'Haymaking goes on about June 20 and or 25,1 think by then the thrush has stopped singing, the frogs more or less shut up. Only the oriole is left... If you could present the train without any noise, without a single sound, go to it . . (to Stanislavsky, 23 Nov. 1903). The production was acclaimed as one of the MAT's more evocative, but Chekhov was unconvinced. The reports of friends that Stanislavsky dragged through the last act, prolonging it by thirty minutes, drove the author to cry, 'Stanislavsky has massacred my play!' (to Olga Knipper, 29 Mar 1904) and he was querulous that the posters and advertisements subtitled it a 'drama'. 'Nemirovich and Stanislavsky actually see something in the play other than what I wrote and I can swear the two of them have never once read my play attentively.'

Even if some of Chekhov's complaints can be dismissed as side-effects of his physical deterioration, there is no doubt that the Art Theatre staging misplaced many of Chekhov's intended emphases. He seems to have meant the major role to be Lopakhin, played by Stanislavsky. But Stanislavsky, the son of a textile manufacturer, preferred the part of the feckless aristocrat Gayev to that of a nouveau riche, and handed Lopakhin over to Leonidov, a less experienced actor. Olga Knipper, whom the author saw in the grotesque role of the German governess, was cast as Ranevskaya. Immediately the central focus shifted to the genteel family of landowners, because the strongest actors were in those parts. Later on, fugitives from the Revolu­tion identified so closely with Ranevskaya and Gayev that they disseminated a nostalgic view of the gentry's plight throughout the West. Soviet productions then went to the opposite extreme, reinterpreting Lopakhin as a man of the people capable of building a new society, preferably by Five Year Plans, and the student Trofimov as an eloquent harbinger of that brave new world.

Choosing sides immediately reduces the play's complex­ity and ambiguity. Chekhov had no axe to grind, not even the one that hews down the orchard. Neither Lopakhin nor Trofimov is endowed with greater validity than Ranevs- kaya or Gayev. Trofimov is consistently undercut by comic devices: after a melodramatic exit line, 'All is over between us!', he falls downstairs, and, despite his claim to be in the vanguard of progress, is too absent-minded to locate his own galoshes, an undignified prop if ever there was one. Even his earnest speech about the idle upperclasses and the benighted workers is addressed to the wrong audience: how can Ranevskaya possibly identify with the Asiastic bestiality that Trofimov indicts as a Russian characteristic? Only in the hearing of infatuated Anya do Trofimov's words seem prophetic; at other times, his inability to realise his situation renders them absurd.

Chekhov was anxious to avoid the stage cliches of the kulak, the hard-hearted, loudmouthed merchant, in his portrayal of Lopakhin; after all, Lopakhin shares Chekhov's own background as a man of peasant origin who worked his way up in a closed society. He can be the tactless boor that Gayev insists he is, exulting over his purchase of the orchard and starting its decimation even before the family leaves. But in the same breath, he is aware of his shortcomings, longs for a more poetic existence, and has, in the words of his antagonistic Trofimov, 'delicate gentle fingers, like an artist... a delicate, gentle soul'. And for all his pragmatism, he too is comically inept when it comes to romance. His half-hearted wooing of Varya may result from a more deep-seated love of her foster-mother.