Before the premiere of Chehkov's famous "The Cherry Orchard" at the North Theatre last Sunday, director Lin Zhaohua claimed his production would offer the audience something amazing.
That "something" starts from the moment you set foot inside the theatre. The interior has been completely restructured. The stalls have been given over to the stage - the audience can only buy tickets for the second tier seats.
The enlarged stage has been transformed into a cherry orchard, with eight forlorn trees dotting the yellow earth. And a foreboding sky of limestone bears down upon the audience. Here resembles a grotto, and one can only marvel at the stage designers, Yi Liming and Tan Shaoyuan, who have worked wonders to craft this life-like landscape from plastic and iron wires.
The four-act play, part of a series called "Chekhov Forever" and produced by the National Theatre Company of China, will run till October 3.
"The designer, Yi, has worked with me on quite a few plays. And this time his special set has offered great challenges. The space which buries the entire first floor stimulates me to think over what and how best to present the space," says Lin.
It is hard to say if the setting inspired Lin in his production, but the director does try a subversive approach to the story. "You may find it very different from what Chekhov represents in your own mind. I don't say the certain style of Chekhov from your view is not right, I just try to interpret in another way," he explains.
Direction
Under Lin's direction, the play has a great deal of tension working on different levels. Personal tragedy is paramount. Madame Ranevsky comes from an aristocratic family, but married beneath her class to an alcoholic husband, and when he died, followed shortly by her son, she eloped with another man. She cared for this man through his illnesses, and he repaid her by robbing her in Paris and finding another woman. She finds herself in heavy debt and has to sell her cherry orchard.
On another level, the play centers on complicated social changes brought about by the recent freedom given to the serfs and the decaying power of the aristocracy.
Lopakhin, born to a serf family working on an estate becomes wealthy and buys the land while Firs, the old serf who spent most of his life on the estate, remains a servant and dies soon after the estate is auctioned off.
Tong Daoming, a renowned expert in Russian literature and drama says Lin's version highlights the directing style of his own. "It is a unique interpretation, natural and modern. It is a high-level production," Tong says.
But he also points disappointment in that there is no sound of axes cutting down the orchard. "It is an important detail in the original play," he explains.
Although Lin has input much of his oven creation, his production still maintains many characteristics of Chekhov. The first is the "indirect action" which is a technique Chekhov was most famous for. It involves action important to the play's plot occurring off-stage. Instead of seeing such action happen, the audience learns about it by watching characters react to it on stage.
Lopakhin's speech at the end of act three, recounting the sale of the cherry orchard, is one of the examples of indirect action. Although the sale of the cherry orchard takes place off-stage, out of sight of the audience, its expectation drives the plot.
Then the comedy and tragedy are mixed, which is what Lin has mainly explored in the play. Traditionally, humor and tragedy have been kept separate in dramatic works. Although Chekhov is certainly not the first playwright to mix comic and tragic elements on stage, he develops this tendency by creating a play that defies classification as either one of these two dramatic genres.
"Works such as 'The Cherry Orchard,' which cannot be subjected to the traditional standards of classification, have helped build new modern literary traditions through their innovation in genre," says Lin.
Ironic acts
Symbolism and irony are the two main features of the play.
The symbols are too numerous to count, but many of them hinge on the idea of the changing social order or the specific circumstance of a given character.
The large ring of keys in the hand of Barbara, Madame Ranevsky's eldest daughter, symbolizes her practicality and her power. She holds the keys throughout the play until finally she throws them to the foot of Lopakhin. The cherry orchard symbolizes the old social order, the aristocratic home, and its destruction symbolizes the social change. Firs himself is a figure of old days while Anya, Madame Ranevsky's younger daughter is a figure of hope.
Irony appears in many instances, and when it is not used for purely comic effect, it is tightly bound to the theme of blindness. For example, in act two, Madame Ranevsky complains loudly about how she cannot control her money, while in the same breath she allows servant Yasha, the most untrustworthy character, to pick up her spilled purse. The fact that she is able to talk about her weakness and neglect the safety of her money in the same breath indicates that, despite her complaints, she is still blind to much of her problem.
However the failure of the production is that, except for a few leading performers, many did not do good job. Many of them are students of director Lin's senior drama course at Peking University.
Playing the leading role Madame Ranevsky, Jiang Wenli guarantees the box-office to some extent and her performance deserves applause.
She portrays well the irrational woman who complains that she does not have enough money to pay her own mortgage, then, moments later, gives Pishtchik money for his mortgage; she laments that there is barely enough for the servants of the household to eat, then dines at restaurants and tips the waiters in gold.
In her understanding, Madame Ranevsky is a ridiculous character, a woman completely incapable of dealing with difficulty and a woman controlled too much by her passions and not enough by her intellect.
"Throughout the play, her debts are a symbol of her personality; she is an excessive woman who does whatever her emotions incline her to do, regardless of consequences, financial or otherwise," Jiang says. "Her words suggest that she wants to save her money, but her actions always betray a tendency to the opposite."
Jiang is one of the most popular actresses on film and TV screen. It is the first time that she returns to the stage after she graduated from Beijing Academy of Film 12 years ago.
(China Daily September 23, 2004)
