Anton Chekhov

The act takes place in three dimensions: the forestage with its brief interchanges by individual characters, the forced gaiety of the dancing in the background, and the offstage auction whose outcome looms over it all. Without leaving the sphere of the mundane, we have what Novalis called 'a sequence of ideal events running parallel to reality'. Characters are thrust out from the indistinct background and then return to it. Scantily identified, the postal clerk and the stationmaster surge forward, unaware of the main characters' inner lives, and make unwitting ironic comment. The stationmaster, for instance, recites Aleksey Tolstoy's orotund poem 'The Sinful Woman' about a courtesan's conversion by the Christus at a lavish orgy in Judaea. The opening lines, describing a sumptuous banquet, cast a sardonic reflection on the frumps gathered on this dismal occasion. They also show the subsequent interview between the puritanical Trofimov ('I am above love') and the self-confessed sinner Ranevskaya to be a parodic confrontation between a Messiah with a scanty beard and a Magdalene in a Parisian ballgown. Charlotta is described in the stage directions as a nameless 'figure in a grey tophat and checked trousers' that waves its arms and jumps up and down, an unexplained phantasm erupting out of nowhere, just as Anya materialises behind a rug. (Charlotta's tricks, performed irrelevantly throughout the play, point up the arbitrariness of human action.) The act culminates in the moving juxtaposition of Ranevskaya's weeping and Lopakhin's laughter, as the unseen musicians play loudly at his behest.

A party as a playground for contrasting moods was a staple of romantic stagecraft. Surviving examples in Verdi's operas Un Ballo in Maschera and La Traviata (which might be translated The Sinful Woman) drew on popular plays by Scribe and Dumas fils. The Russian dramatic tradition was also rich in such situations: in Woe from Wit, Griboyedov scored the hectic tempo of the hero's despair against the inanity of a high society soiree; Pushkin's Feast in Plaguetime mordantly contrasted libertinage and fatality; Lermontov's Masquerade made a costume ball the setting for betrayal and murder. Chekhov's innovation is to reduce the romantic element to banality in consonance with his own favoured method. So the ball in The Cherry Orchard is a sorry congregation of provincial nobodies, upstart ser­vants and a klezmer band. The gaiety becomes even more hollow and the pervasion of the grotesque more pungent.

The return to the nursery, now stripped of its evocative trappings, in Act Four, confirms the inexorable expulsion. In Act One, it had been a room to linger in; now it is a cheerless space in which characters loiter only momentarily on their way to somewhere else. The old Russian tradition of sitting for a moment before taking leave becomes especially meaningful when there are no chairs, only trunks and bundles to perch on. The champagne is going flat. The ghosts that Gayev and Ranevskaya had seen in the orchard in the first act have now moved indoors, in the person of Firs, who is doomed to haunt the scene of the past, since he has no future.

'Ladies in white dresses' had been one of Chekhov's earliest images for the play. Visually, the dominant note is etoliation, from Ranevskaya confusing the clusters of white blossoms in the garden with her late mother in a white dress, to the final tableau of Firs in his white waistcoat recumbent on the sofa. Achromatism is ambival­ent: it is vernal and virginal, and at the same time the hue of dry bones and sterility. The white is set in relief by Varya's customary suit of woe. The American actress Eva Le Gallienne, astutely noted Chekhov's repetitive use of a young woman in black. 'Just as in painting there is a note of black in one of his female characters ... the wearing of black is an outward manifestation of an inner state of mind, especially when worn by young women.'¹¹ The Seagull's Masha, 'in mourning for her life,' and Masha in Three Sisters wearing black on a festive occasion, are shown up as poseuses. Varya fancies herself tramping the country from shrine to shrine, 'like a nun,' says Ranevskaya; but at the belt of her black gown hangs a ring of keys, the emblem of a bustling, officious nature ill-suited for spiritual withdrawal. When she gives up her keys, it is to fling them, in unholy anger, at Lopakhin.

The black and white of impending death tinge life at every turn, but without painting over the comic tonality. Act One is rife with memento mori: Lopakhin's 'late father' heads a cortege composed of Ranevskaya's mother, little