ANTON CHEKHOV’S In a version by TOM MURPHY Directed by GARRY HYNES 1 ANTON CHEKHOV’S In a version by TOM MURPHY Black Box Theatre, Galway 22 February – 7 March 2020 Live in Cinemas 5 March 2020 Creatives Cast Company Director Ranyevskaya Séamus Hughes Garry Hynes Derbhle Crotty Delia Keane Set and Costume Design Yasha Mary McHugh Francis O’Connor Ian-Lloyd Anderson Seán T. Ó’Meallaigh Co-Costume Design Varya Michael Rooney Doreen McKenna Siobhán Cullen Peter Shine Lighting Design Dunyasha Ambre Shoneff James F. Ingalls Megan Cusack Sound Design Yepikhodov Gregory Clarke Peter Daly Act One May Movement Director Anya Act Two 8 weeks later David Bolger Rachel Feeney Act Three August Rory Nolan in rehearsal for for Nolan in rehearsal Rory Music Boris Act Four Short time after Conor Linehan Garrett Lombard Assistant Lopakhin Costume Design Aaron Monaghan Clíodhna Hallissey The Cherry Orchard Gayev Rory Nolan Charlotta Helen Norton (Photograph: Boyd Challenger.) Boyd (Photograph: Firs John Olohan Petya Marty Rea 2 3 A Kind of Farewell A Note on The Cherry Orchard by Marina Carr Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, born in 1860, at Melikhovo had been cut down after he ‘You should fall in love! A man of your age! Superman? All his hopes seem to reside died in 1904 at the age of forty-four from sold the estate. And in his prose poem And maybe you’d understand something… in the future. ‘Humanity’, Petya says, ‘is the dreaded ‘White Death’, consumption, The Steppe, he has the young Egorushka You’re not above love…’ moving forward towards a higher truth’. tuberculosis, fatal before penicillin. remember; One can only hope. One has to believe in Chekhov, a doctor himself, long refused Or Firs? Firs who hates his freedom and Time, in Teleology, that we are getting to name his disease and wrote right up to ‘White crosses and gravestones. And when reminisces nostalgically about the good old better. This from the most humane of the end which occurred in the spa town of the cherry trees blossomed, white blobs days of serfdom. Or Gayev, sucking sweets, Artists for whom time ran out. Badenweiler, Germany. merged with the white cherry blossom still being dressed by Firs, waxing eloquent to become a white sea. And when they over bookcases while being obnoxious to The final image of the play is sound. Two The Cherry Orchard, his final play, was ripened, the white gravestones and crosses the help. sounds. The string breaking and the axe written in 1903 and is considered one of were spattered with crimson clots like chopping. The string and the axe. It leaves the masterpieces of Modernist Theatre blood.’ As Petya says to Anya; us wondering many things. Like all great alongside Ibsen and Strindberg. Chekhov writing the possibilities of meaning unfold called it a comedy in four acts, but it is hard It is hard not to think of the tubercular ‘Owning living souls: that has changed endlessly. A haunting. And prophetic in its to read or see it as such from the distance Chekhov spitting red blobs of lung tissue you all.’ way when we consider the tragic trajectory of over one hundred years. Yes, it has discreetly into his white handkerchief or of Russian history. many comic elements but the overriding that in the writing of The Cherry Orchard, And still Chekhov deals gently with them symbol of The Cherry Orchard seems to he was writing some sort of valediction, as he does with all his characters. He sees It is very exciting to watch Garry Hynes be at variance with Comedy unless we a kind of farewell. And something there the absurdity and the desperation in all take on another master in Druid’s first assume he means by Comedy, Balzacian too of being cut down before his time like our hearts, but his hand is gentle and his outing with a major Chekhov play. And Human Comedy; namely that since the Ranyevskaya’s orchard. eye forgiving as he points all this out. He that it is Tom Murphy’s version we are removal of the Divine from the equation, was the grandson of a serf and knew in seeing is an added attraction given his own we are all lost, abandoned, ridiculous, And what do we make of that mysterious his bones the cost of servitude, the price unique mastery and the long and fruitful absurd. The Cherry Orchard is in a sense mournful sound ‘that seems to fall from the extracted from the vanquished by the collaboration between Garry and Tom and the primal scene where Ranyevskaya and sky, like a harp string breaking far away’? triumphant and this thread runs through Druid down the long decades. A fitting her brother Gayev played as children, Difficult not to read these images and all his work. It is impossible not to root for celebration and tribute to two great writers where Ranyevskaya can still see the ghost motifs as Chekhov’s private commentary Lopakhin when he buys the cherry orchard who have mapped the consternation, of her mother and it is the backdrop where, on his impending death and indeed on all and ousts his family’s oppressors. But it is desperation and absurdity of the human through emotional paralysis and ineptitude who are cut down before their time. a testament to Chekhov’s writing that we heart in its search for meaning and that and grief, they will allow that Eden, that can be happy for Lopakhin and still feel the elusive thing – happiness. past, that primal site, be destroyed. And the feckless Ranyevskaya? A tragic loss that Ranyevskaya feels. figure to my mind. Fleeing her past, February 2020 Also trees, and cherry trees in particular, her drowned son, her abusive lover. So what is Chekhov saying in his final figure large in Chekhov’s own personal Ranyevskaya, who gives away all her play? That ‘All of Russia is an orchard ’? Acknowledgement to Rosamund Bartlett’s biography Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. memory table. He was an inveterate money, who lives on a diet of coffee and That humanity as we are now is merely planter of trees. He was distressed to pills, who screams at Petya; the Nietzschean bridge from Beast to hear that the cherry orchard he planted 4 5 The World of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard The Cherry Orchard Live in Cinema Within less than a month after Chekhov’s Further reforms in law, education, finance, In a first for an In a first for an Irish theatre company, Druid and Element Pictures The Cherry Orchard opened in Moscow and administration, and investment in Irish theatre joined forces to bring The Cherry Orchard to cinemas around the infrastructure and the media, meant that in January 1904, Russia found itself at company, Druid world. war with Japan. The war’s incompetent Russia became one of the most rapidly prosecution and the humiliating defeats developing economies of the late 19th and Element In March 2020, The Cherry Orchard was seen live in 30 cinemas inflicted on the Tsar’s forces helped to century. New social groups emerged Pictures joined across Ireland and the UK. A planned year-long programme of precipitate the 1905 revolution. It was a alongside the old castes: entrepreneurs; forces to bring live-recorded showings internationally was to follow, as well as a industrial workers; and the middle classes, year in which the country was convulsed by The Cherry run in Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. With the arrival of the protests, strikes and rebellion that nearly often drawn from the déclassé minor coronavirus, these plans were postponed. toppled Tsar Nicolas II. 1905 ushered nobility, many of whom were indebted Orchard to Russia into the modern era politically and and lost their money and estates after cinemas around Kindly supported by Galway City Council and the Adrian showed how far the country had changed in emancipation. the world. Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation of the Sidney E Frank Foundation, the preceding half century. this project is rooted in Druid’s passionate belief that audiences Ranyevskaya and her family belong to an have a right to see first class theatre in their own communities. In 1855, when the Tsar’s grandfather, old patriarchal gentry family, who cannot This platform allows Druid to reach new audiences nationally and Alexander II, ascended the throne, Russia adapt to the world of modern capitalism. internationally, shining a spotlight on Galway and Irish theatre. was still a caste society. Most people Her brother Gayev, who has found remained in the estate (or social station) employment in a bank, is, in social terms, Druid collaborated with Serpent Productions and NEP into which they had been born. This more middle class than aristocratic. And Broadcasting Group to broadcast The Cherry Orchard direct from applied above all to Russia’s approximately Lopakhin, the enterprising and hardheaded the Black Box Theatre on Thursday 5 March 2020. 33.4 million serfs (peasants), approximately businessman (a familiar figure in early 20th 23 million of whom were owned by the century Russia) is the son of a serf. His Thompson) Matthew Monaghan (Photograph: Aaron landed gentry. They were tied to the land plan to ‘develop’ the cherry orchard with and to their master who disposed of their holiday cottages for the new urban middle lives as he saw fit. They were not free men, classes is thoroughly contemporary. In could not own property or even contract The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov captured a marriage without their master’s approval society in transition from the ancien régime and were under the legal authority of to a more brash modernity – an order that their master (who could inflict brutal itself, as we know, was soon swept away by corporal punishment on them).