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Tag: Ranevskaya

CHEKHOV TELLING TIME: Part 2

Chekhov and Temporal Complexity in THE CHERRY ORCHARD

On July 2, 1904, Olga Knipper summoned a doctor to the hotel in the German spa of Badenweiler for her famous husband who was dying. After arriving, the doctor ordered champagne from room service for Chekhov.  The champagne was to relieve his breathing. Olga reports that he sat up in bed and said in German, “Ich sterbe” [I’m dying]. . . “Then he picked up the glass, turned to me, smiled his wonderful smile and said: ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.’ He drank it all to the last drop, quietly lay on his left side and was soon silent forever.”

Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov, 1901

Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov, 1901

Even with his last words, he was gauging the experience of drinking champagne in a larger context.   long time since. Chekhov was twenty-four when he first became aware of blood coming up from his throat.  For twenty years slowly gave way to tuberculosis. During this time he steadfastly downplayed his condition to family and friends.   He refused to be seen as a patient. As the author of THE CHERRY ORCHARD, his last completed play, Chekhov immersed the world in the temporal complexity that genius and a life long courting death had made possible.

Donald Rayfield in The Cherry Orchard: Catastrophe and Comedy has written that the subject of the play had a germination that goes back to Chekhov’s childhood.   The author spent holidays in the Ukraine among a cherry orchard on a farm.  Important too was the deforestation of Russia in the 1880s.  And   Chekhov himself owned a cherry orchard that was chopped down in 1899 by a timber dealer. Clearly the long-term biographical association of cherry orchards for Anton is important to the construction of his final play.

The Most Shocking Line in the Play

Lopakhin opens the play.   It is he that provides the sense of urgency, who must convince the audience of the direness of the situation.  He must do this even if Liubov Ranevskaya is unable to give the selling of the estate her full attention. The stage directions ask for him to check his watch frequently. He gives the terrible, impending date of the sale twice specifically (August 23).   He refers to it more generally often: “Time will not stand still.” In this regard, Lopakhin is prepared to embrace the portentous future.

Yet, his personal shame at having come from peasantry (“Like a pig in a pastry shop”) and his unease with the advancing new political order indicate that he is stuck in the mud of his private history as much as the other characters are in their own. His hands hang at his sides as if they belong to someone else. By the end of the play when he fails to propose to Varya (fails to ask for her hand), even though this marriage proposal has long been anticipated by Varya and her mother Ranevskaya, we the audience understand that for Lopakhin the conundrum of love and marriage to the adopted daughter of an aristocratic family is as difficult to face as the sale of the cherry orchard has been for the others.

Still, it is Lopakhin that delivers the most shocking line in the play: “The cherry orchard is now mine!” It is a bald statement of a present fact that Chekhov jolts us with. This announcement is like no other statement for its power and immediacy. It leaps off the page. Chekhov has prepared for it by constructing a rich temporal world where talk of the past and future has dominated.

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TIME TELLING WITH CHEKHOV

Time and The Mystery of the Broken String

One of the most important stage directions in theatre history appears in Anton Chekhov’s THE CHERRY ORCHARD. It is the middle of Act II and the characters have assembled in an open space near an abandoned chapel. Madame Ranevskaya has delivered a revelatory monologue about her past, in which she recounts the punishments she has received for her sins—a fate that includes a husband who drank himself to death with champagne, then love on the rebound with a cruel younger man, and—most painfully—her little boy drowning in the river.

The former tutor of the lost child, Trofimov, counters with a speech about human progress. Lopakhin discusses his business, Yepikhodov strolls by playing his guitar, and Gayev gushes about the setting sun. “Oh wondrous nature, cast upon us your eternal rays, . . .” Varya and Anya plead with him to stop. Spoofing Gayev and his pool-playing references, Trofimov quips, “We’d rather have the yellow ball in the side pocket.” They all sit in silence, except for the mumbling old servant Firs.

And then . . .

Suddenly a distant sound seems to fall from the sky, a sad sound, like a harp string breaking. It dies away.

Much has been written about the symbolism of the broken string and how important it is to gaining access to Chekhov’s dramatic work. That the sound seems to fall from the sky, precipitation-like, a singular note of portent—gives credence to its cosmic relevance in the world of the play.

Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Madame Ranevskaya asks, “What was that?” and shivers and grows nervous. Lopakhin’s theory that the sound is an echo from a faraway mine shaft speaks to his bent to exploit nature for monetary gain. Gayev ventures that the sound came from “some kind of bird . . . like a heron” fixing it within a pastoral context. This is trumped by the eternal student Trofimov hearing it as the cry of another bird, the more intellectual owl. The elderly Firs chimes in and then adds scope. “It’s like just before the trouble started. They heard an owl screech, and the kettle wouldn’t stop whistling.” Gayev asks Firs, “Before what trouble?” and the old man answers: “The day we got our freedom back.”

Firs is referring to Czar Alexander II’s emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 and the shift away from the feudal system. A view commonly held by scholars is that “broken string” results from the tension created by the older more-natural order (as symbolized by the setting sun, screeching owl, and Ranevskaya’s tragic river) and a newer more man-made order (yellow ball in the side pocket, whistling kettle, and the arrival and departure of Ranevskaya and Gayev by train that frames the story).

The tension between the infinite and the finite, between the natural and man-made order, begins in THE CHERRY ORCHARD with the play’s first line. Lopakhin’s opening words are: “The train’s finally in, thank God. What time is it?” From here Chekhov created a play of astounding temporal complexity. Four acts later he underscores his breaking-string effect by repeating it in the play’s conclusion, the final stage directions.

Ranevskaya’s estate has been sold. Firs discovers that he is locked out.   The eighty-seven year old servant, a human timepiece and representative from a bygone era lies down on the front porch. He very possible dies. The distant sound occurs, in this instance, just before the quiet that precedes the sound of an ax cutting a cherry tree.

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