"The Cherry Orchard" as Comedy Author(s): Jacqueline E. M. Latham Source: Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1958), pp. 21-29 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3204230 Accessed: 28-11-2016 01:42 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Educational Theatre Journal This content downloaded from 37.8.23.143 on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 01:42:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CHERRY ORCHARD AS COMEDY JACQUELINE E. M. LATHAM Chekhov suffered during his lifetime Four Colonels. Desmond MacCarthy from bad productions of his plays. (as did Shaw and many others) fully ac- Even Stanislavsky, the founder of ceptedthe Chekhov's plays as tragedies of Moscow Art Theatre, misunderstood frustration and in 1937, in The New the nature of his comedies, The Seagull Statesman and Nation, he reviewed a and The Cherry Orchard, and after theproduction of Uncle Vanya sharply crit- production of the latter Chekhov wrote icizing the humor and comedy in the to his wife: "How awful it is! An act performance. However, his criticisms that ought to take twelve minutes elicited at a letter from Dorothy Sayers most lasts forty minutes. There is only(whose first acquaintance with Chek- one thing I can say: Stanislavsky hov has this was) in defense of the produc- ruined my play for me."1 Stanislavsky tion, saying "But the whole tragedy of and his fellow-director Nemirovich- futility is that it never succeeds in Danchenko believed that Chekhov was achieving tragedy. In its blackest wrong in thinking that he had written moments it is inevitably doomed to the comedies; when Stanislavsky had read comic gesture."2 This, the central point The Cherry Orchard he wrote to Chek- of Chekhov's comedy, is what so many hov informing him that it was, in fact, critics have missed. In the United a tragedy. These Moscow productions, States, too, Edmund Wilson writing in which were, of course, in many ways The New Yorker3 admits that in re- very fine, displeased Chekhov who was reading Chekhov's plays he can find a too ill to protest forcibly about them, broader humour than he remembers in and so they became the first of the stageline productions. Indeed, the tradi- of melancholy productions which today tion is established and Chekhov has we accept almost without question been in accepted as a writer of gloomy England and the United States. In- tragedies of frustration; I doubt wheth- deed, the pattern is so well established er he can be reinstated as he would that it was brilliantly and easily paro- wish. died in Peter Ustinov's The Love of The Cherry Orchard,4 Chekhov's last Jacqueline E. M. Latham, a graduate of London play, was written slowly and painfully University, spent 1956-7 as a Teaching Associate at Indiana University. 2 Dorothy Sayers, The New Statesman and 1 March 29, 1904. The Letters of Anton Nation, Feb. 27, 1937, p. 324. Pavlovitch Tchehov to Olga Leonardovna Knip- 3 Edmund Wilson, "Seeing Chekhov Plain," per, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, n.d.), The New Yorker, Nov. 22, 1952, p. 180-194. p. 374. The last sentence is omitted here. It is 4 The text used is the translation by Stark given in full by David Magarshack, in Chekhov Young in Best Plays by Chekhov (New York, a Life (London, 1952), footnote on p. 383. 1956). All names will be given in his spelling. This content downloaded from 37.8.23.143 on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 01:42:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 22 EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL in 1903. It was produced in January, Cherry Orchard (although it was not, 1904, by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art of course, of this play that he was Theatre only six months before the au- speaking). All classes of men were for thor's death. The subject of the play Chekhov possible subjects of comedy; is the impoverishment of an aristocratic his plays are about human nature and family who sell their house and orchard his sympathies did not lie exclusively to one of their ex-serfs who wishes to with one class, nor did he wish to satir- build summer cottages. The passing ize the other. It is because he shows of an era is a favourite subject for senti- "divergence from the norms" that The mentalists and it would have been Cherry Orchard is a comedy, and these easy for Chekhov to have shown anormalities aristo- he sees in the wealthy as cratic nobility and integrity at wellthe asmer- in their servants. The play has, cy of an unscrupulous bourgeois. certainly, But tragic overtones, as has he did not write that play, althoughMoliere's Le Misan,thrope, but the many producers have wished point that of viewhe of the author is definite- had. He wrote instead a comedy. ly comic, "The and as if he wishes to empha- play has turned out not a drama, size thisbut he a introduces certain farcical comedy, in parts even a farce."5 incidents: He squeaking boots, clumsi- did not see the passing of the oldness, order conjuring tricks, a governess as tragic, and, in emphasizing dressed the so-as a man jumping about in a cial uselessness of the aristocratic fam- ball-room, and an accidental blow with ily, he treats the subject from a comic a stick struck by Varya on the man she viewpoint. He sees in them no love, loves. no sense of responsibility; their deepest Chekhov's purpose in writing The emotion is only sentiment. Cherry Orchard was to give a criti- Chekhov's father was of peasant cism of life by showing characters who stock, for the grandfather had pur- deviate from the norm. The cherry or- chased their freedom, although he was, chard itself is not a constant symbol of said Chekhov, "a most rabid upholder beauty wantonly destroyed, but, as the of serfdom."6 Chekhov's love for hu- centre of the play, it has a different sig- manity was universal; he neither ideal-nificance for each character. There are ized the serfs from whom he sprang twelve nor people who make up the come- did he fawn upon the rich who die were humaine, all individuals, all more now his friends. Lydia Avilov, in or herless comic, some contributing to a memoir, Chekhov in my Life, quotescentral pattern of meaning, others Chekhov as saying, "I will describe life merely performing peripherally their to you truthfully, that is artistically, own comic dance and only occasionally and you will see in it what you have impinging on the central pattern. not seen before, what you never no- ticed before: its divergence from Althoughthe Chekhov considered the norms, its contradictions."7 It is ex- merchant Lopahin the central figure in actly this that Chekhov achieves in The the play,8 it is best for us to consider first the brother and sister, Gayeff and 5 Letter to Madame Stanislavsky, Sept. 15, Madame Ranevskaya. They are middle- 1903. The Life and Letters of Anton Tchekhov, ed. and trans. S. S. Koteliansky & Philip Tomlin- aged children. For Gayeff life is a game, son (New York, n.d.), p. 290. 6 Quoted in Chekhov a Life, p. 18. 7 Chekhov in my Life, trans. David Magar- 8 Letter to Stanislavsky, Oct. 30, 1903. Life shack (London, 1950), p. 32. and Letters, p. 291. This content downloaded from 37.8.23.143 on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 01:42:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE CHERRY ORCHARD AS COMEDY no more serious than the game ing Fiers of andbil- the bookcase too.10 For the liards which cheers him when his estate brother and sister the orchard is a sym- is sold and which he plays in imagina- bol of their youth, the youth they have tion (though with words and gestures) never left. As Madame Ranevskaya looks whenever the problems of the material out at it from their childhood nursery, world seem too much for him. He she imagines that one of the trees in leaves his estate for a life as a bank blossom is their mother, dressed in official saying "I am a financier white, now- walking through the orchard. "I yellow ball into the side pocket."9 slept Even in this nursery," she exclaims, "and his tardily acquired career as a financier looked out on the orchard from here, -for which his own financial failure every morning happiness awoke with has ill-prepared him-seems to me,be itonly was just as it is now, then, noth- a continuation of his life at the billiard ing has changed." (I) This is, of course, table: trying to make a big break be-Chekhov's point. The brother and sister fore he finally loses. have not changed, yet the world has. Gayeff's ridiculousness is accentuated They are children in an adult world, by his continual eating of candies. and for the most part they are unaware "They say I've eaten my fortune up in of reality; even in their rare moments hard candies" (II) he says laughing, but of self-knowledge they lack the power we know he doesn't believe it.