Anton Pavlovič Čehov
The Cherry Orchard
Višnjovyj sad
The Cherry Orchard, the last theatre play by A. P. Chekhov (1860–1904, speaks about the transition from one world to another using a metaphor for the destruction of a cherry orchard and its future use as a holiday resort. The play speaks about sacrificing the seemingly useless beauty of cherries for which the estate was famous for a financial benefit and fun that the new owner wishes to offer his customers. The metaphor of change! The questions 'What would be the cut down cherry orchard of today's world?', 'What loss are we experiencing today?' and 'What cherry orchard has been sacrificed?' are at the centre of the play.
The Cherry Orchard is our failure to get a definitive answer to our own lives. It is a play that has to be set always at a crossroad of history – the time of big social-political-cultural dilemmas and changes. It starts at the point where Faust ends – the moment of the recognition of failure. The roads ahead are closed, the horizon gets dark. From this point of view Lopahin – as Georges Banu writes in her wonderful book Our Theatre, The Cherry Orchard – is a character
related to Mephistophilis, as he asks the same price for the solution: the sale price of the our souls.
We live in the time of huge dilemmas: human values seem to be turned upside down, culture is less and less assumed and supported, even threatened with disappearance, Internet and Facebook do what the secret police did in the 70’s and 80’s – they bring the era of the total surveillance. The threat with destruction has been ahead of us in time and space.
The director would like the performance to become the expression of our attachment and advocate for the "useless” thing. Like culture, tradition, faith, poetry, civilization. One, in which the silence and non-action of Liubov Andreevna and Gaiev are not a sign of impotence or helplessness, but a chosen passive way of resistance. Like a huge white library full of long time not read volumes, which opens to a frozen sea.
Adapted from the articles by Georges Banu and Gábor Tompa
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Photo: Damjan Švarc
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Photo: Damjan Švarc
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Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
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Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
