Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard (review)

Reviewed by: Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard Sharon Marie Carnicke James N. Loehlin . Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard. Plays in Production Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 248, illustrated. $75.00 (Hb); $24.99 (Pb). True to the spirit of the series to which he contributes, James N. Loehlin provides a chronological study of the production history of one of the world's great modern dramas, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Beginning with the premiere, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, Loehlin traverses more than one-hundred years of notable productions in many different interpretive and visual styles, from leading directors and producers as varied as the U.S.'s Eva Le Gallienne and James Earl Jones; Russia's Vsevolod Meyerhold, Maria Knebel, and Anatoly Efros; Italy's Giorgio Strehler; Britain's Tyrone Guthrie and Peter Brook; Rumania's Andrei Serban; Germany's Peter Stein; and Japan's Tadashi Suzuki. By the end of Loehlin's book, the reader has encountered a world of productions, from naturalist to minimalist and from those anchored in Russian culture to those conceived as universally human. In this grand international tour, Loehlin has, of course, benefited much from Laurence Senelick's exhaustive guide to the stage history of all Chekhov's plays, The Chekhov Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Loehlin rightly begins with the play. He gives an act-by-act account of "the performance decisions Chekhov makes himself, in his stage directions and in the implied action of his dialogue" (10). More importantly, Loehlin also raises "points of interpretation that are left open to actors, designers and directors" (10). This first chapter will be especially helpful to students who are unfamiliar both with Chekhov's play and with the general notion that a play is a "score" for performance rather than a fully finished work of art. In his introduction, Loehlin identifies three axes of comparison in the play that have prompted radically different directorial decisions. The first two, genre and style, concern Chekhov's artistic sensibility and craft. Is the play tragedy, comedy, or hybrid? Is it realistic, symbolist, or something else? The third axis of comparison, politics, is thematic. Does Chekhov predict the Russian Revolution or does he speak to humanity in a universal sense? To my mind, there is another important but unstated axis of comparison, involving Chekhov's wilfully ambiguous treatment of his characters, who are, as he himself once said, neither heroes nor villains, but sometimes clowns. Loehlin treats this axis implicitly, as he traces the various choices used by [End Page 152] actors to embody the central roles of the play. Consider, for example, Charles Laughton's broadly played "loutish" Lopakhin and Athene Seyler's high comic Ranevskaya in Tyrone Guthrie's 1933 production at the Old Vic (105–06) as against Raul Julia's "young, vigorous, and aggressive" merchant and Irene Worth's "intelligent, forceful and queenly" landowner in Andrei Serban's 1977 staging at Lincoln Center (160–61). In chapter two, Loehlin dives into the production history by examining how the premiere 1904 production treated these comparative axes. Loehlin boldly calls Stanislavsky's staging "one of the most influential productions of any play in the history of world theatre" (40) and, later again, "one of the most influential productions in modern history" (47). This statement is borne out in later chapters, when Loehlin traces the production's influence through the international tours of the Moscow Art Theatre during the 1920s. He also points out that, in the Soviet era, the pre-revolutionary production needed to be "refitted" to the politics of the time (84), a cultural point that he could productively deepen through an expanded examination of the Soviet aversion to Chekhovian characters like Trofimov, in turn ardent revolutionary and silly adolescent, who resist interpretation as heroes, and through a fuller analysis of Nemirovich-Danchenko's restagings at the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1940s. In the five following chapters, Loehlin looks at how Russian directors other than Stanislavsky treated their native dramatist, how early English language productions in both the United States and Britain sometimes forced Chekhov into foreign moulds as they tried to "make Muscovites of Englishmen...

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