The Visual Representation of the Boundary Between Past and Present Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Suzman’s The Free State1

LIDA KRÜGER

Introduction HE FIRST DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS in South Africa in 1994 marked a definite temporal boundary between the past (the time of apartheid) T and the present (the time of democracy). Viljoen and Van der Merwe2 describe the state of South Africa after apartheid as liminal – a state usually associated with postcolonial contexts, as postcolonialism entails social change. Gilbert and Tompkins define postcolonialism as an “engagement with and contestation of colonialism’s discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies,”3 its specifically political agenda being “to dismantle the hege- monic boundaries and the determinants that create unequal relations of power

1 Preliminary note: The Cherry Orchard was read in translation. Suzman used a literal translation of the play by Tania Alexander in her adaptation. However, no such translation could be found in print. I have therefore used a version of the play by Pam Gems from the literal translation by Tania Alexander. Although the full title of Janet Suzman’s play is The Free State: A South African Response to Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”, I shall refer to it throughout this essay by the main title only. 2 Hein Viljoen & Chris N. van der Merwe, “Introduction: A Poetics of Liminality and Hybridity,” in Beyond the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature, ed. Hein Viljoen & Chris N. van der Merwe (New York: Peter Lang, 2007): 2. 3 Helen Gilbert & Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Poli- tics (London: Routledge, 1996): 2. 94 LIDA KRÜGER a based on binary oppositions.”4 In essence, then, postcolonialism is concerned with the dissolving of the boundaries between various binary oppositions such as ‘us’ vs ‘them’, ‘black’ vs ‘white’, or ‘colonized’ vs ‘colonizer’. Yet, as social change implies the crossing of a boundary between past and present, postcolonialism also creates new boundaries as it dismantles old ones. While the concept of boundaries is investigated in all genres of (notably postcolonial) literature, drama is a genre which offers interesting possibilities in this regard. Because drama is intended to be performed, it is an audio- visual medium. Spatial or even conceptual boundaries can be explored visual- ly on stage, as Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Janet Suzman’s South African adaptation, The Free State, show. This essay aims to investigate how the boundary between past and present is not only described in these plays but also shown visually through enactment and the attempts by the characters to re-create the past. The Cherry Orchard depicts a Russian noblewoman, Lyubov Ranyev- skaya, and her brother, Leonid Gayev, in the process of losing their estate because of their extravagant life-style. After the abolition of serfdom, the Gayev family has to compete economically with the lower classes but are un- able to do so, leading to the bankruptcy of their estate. Lopakhin, their peasant- born businessman friend, devises a plan which would save the family’s estate, but one that entails the chopping-down of their beloved cherry orchard to make space for a practical housing development. Unable to contemplate the loss of their orchard, the family rejects the plan, thereby losing their estate. Although Lyubov claims to be very attached to the estate, she gave it over to the charge of her adopted daughter, Varya, after her husband died of alcohol abuse and her infant son drowned. The play opens with Lyubov returning to the home of her childhood and youth after an absence of five years. Chekhov uses the medium of theatre to explore the ensuing juxtaposition of past and present, both verbally and visually. When Suzman transposed this text to the South African context, she metic- ulously preserved the structure of Chekhov’s play. The plot of The Free State is essentially the same as that of The Cherry Orchard, although the setting has been changed from early-twentieth-century Russia to post-apartheid South Africa. Lyubov Ranyevskaya becomes Lulu Rademeyer, who, with her brother, Leo Guyver, is not prepared to cut down her cherry orchard in order to save her estate. Leko Lebaka, their black businessman friend, then buys the

4 Gilbert & Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, 3.