Anton Chekhov, 'The Cherry Orchard'. February 2. 01. 6. Theatre and The Family: Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard. Professor Belinda Jack. Music . Particularly good to see some familiar faces from previous lectures and particularly my last lecture on Ibsen's A Doll's House as this evening's lecture is something of a companion piece. The first is this: how does it hold our attention given the limited amount of action? And the second: is it really a comedy as the playwright himself insisted it was? Jean- Louis Barrault, the French actor and director, summarizes the action of The Cherry Orchard in the following way: 'In Act One, the cherry orchard is in danger of being sold, in Act Two it is on the verge of being sold, in Act Three it is sold, and in Act Four it has been sold' (Laurence Senelick Anton Chekhov, 1. Thus described the play seems devoid of dramatic action. The felling of the Orchard, which is arguably the dramatic climax of the play, takes place off- stage. We only hear the axe as it meets the trunk of the first cherry tree. How could the scenario described by Barrault be construed as 'comic'? The play opens at first light in the nursery of the family home in rural Russia. Gayev (Ranyevskaya's brother), Varya (Ranyevskaya's adopted daughter . The trip was motivated by a double- bereavement of her husband and seven- year old son who drowned. Her Russian lover followed her to France but has since abandoned her. Anya, her daughter, and her eccentric governess Charlotta, have travelled to Paris to bring her home. These come to suggest his infantilism. He has never, it seems, grown up. He enjoys 'play' and sucking sweets, which he often resorts to if he feels emotional. For example, he starts sucking one immediately after announcing that the nurse has died while Ranyevskaya was in France. Freud suggested that there were five stages of human development. The first is the oral. According to Freud's scheme, Gayev is stuck in the first phase. The estate is about to be auctioned to pay off the mortgage. While presented with various business plans which would be likely to save the estate, the family turns in on itself, reminisces and essentially does nothing. The play ends with the sale of the estate to the son of a former serf and the family leaves hearing the sound of the cherry orchard as the felling begins. While exploring the socio- economic forces at work in Russia at the turn of the 2. Chekhov was terminally ill and struggling to work at all. The Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekhov. Translated from the Russian by Maria Amadei Ashot. 5 white waistcoat and my yellow dress shoes. Now, the swine’s snout is not fit for the pastry. Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Archived from the original on 4 July 2013. Biography at The Literature Network 'Chekhov's Legacy' by Cornel West at NPR, 2004; The. THE WISDOM OF ANTON CHEKHOV. Table of Contents (with links). Complete summary of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. A cor e o teor nutritivo e alco Complete text of the short play by Walter Wykes. LOPAHIN, a merchant, rests on a stool behind the counter. FIRS, an old man, mumbles incoherently to himself as he sweeps up. In the circumstances it is perhaps surprising that Chekhov had written that The Cherry Orchard was I quote, 'a comedy. I am thinking particularly of Edward Lear and his wonderful so- called 'nonsense poetry'; 'The Owl and the Pussycat' is perhaps the most famous. Dive deep into Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with extended analysis, commentary, and discussion. 23 February 2016 Theatre and The Family: Anton Chekhov, 'The Cherry Orchard' Professor Belinda Jack View PDF Print. The Stanislavsky system would inspire numerous acting teachers around the world, influencing both stage and screen acting particularly after World War II. His theory of acting stressed practice as a mode of inquiry and theory as a stimulus for creative development. He is generally considered one of the great modern theatre practitioners. And the creative partnership . In the writing the play changed considerably but Chekhov continued to insist that it was a 'vaudeville'. On the title page of the published play he designated it a, 'comedy', and in contemporary correspondence he referred to it as, 'not a drama but a comedy, in places even a farce. But Stanislavsky was wholly unconvinced: 'It's not a comedy; it's not a farce. I tried to stop myself, but I couldn't. I can hear you saying, ? The play can, I believe, be produced so as to emphasise its tragic dimension, or it can be brought to life as a marvellously comic event, albeit one tinged with what we might call the 'tragi- comic'. Philosophers have had remarkably little to say about humour. From ancient times on, the most famous philosophers have rarely produced more than an essay. The most that major philosophers like Plato, Hobbes, and Kant wrote about laughter was a few paragraphs within a discussion of another topic. Only a few lesser- known eighteenth- century thinkers such as Frances Hutcheson (8 August 1. The word was not used in its current sense of funniness until the 1. It is now the dominant theory of humour in philosophy and psychology. Other theories which are worth brief mention are the 'superiority theory' and the 'relief theory'. The former accounts for humour's bad reputation as it asserts that we laugh at the misfortunes of others as it gives us a satisfying sense of superiority. This theory can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes. In the Christian tradition humour is inextricably linked to mockery which is deemed uncharitable. The 'Relief Theory' claims that laughter is a homeostatic mechanism that reduces psychological tension caused, for example, by fear. He was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 2. Bergson convinced many thinkers that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism or science for our understanding of reality. This is one of Bergson's two propensities of life (one is degradation towards inert matter and mechanism - and the other, the continual creation of new forms). They cannot give up their comfortable habits and continue to live automatically, apparently blind to the dramatically changed circumstances in which they find themselves. Ranyevskaya and Gayev refuse to adapt to the inevitable. This is, in effect, infantile behaviour: they lack adult perspective and adult 'coping strategies'. This makes them laughable. Trofimov, the eternal student, at one point claims that he is 'above love'. Trofimov is the socialist, even revolutionary, but he too takes things to an absurd and exaggerated extreme, like a stubborn child unwilling to lose an argument. Take the early scene when Ranyevskaya announces her happiness seeing her nursery again after her years in France. Ranyevskaya: The nursery. My own dear room, my lovely room.. I slept in here when I was a little girl. And Dunyasha I recognize.. I feel like leaping in the air and waving my arms about. Perhaps it's all a dream. Oh, but I love my country, God knows I do, I love it tenderly. I couldn't look out of the carriage window - I did nothing but weep. Thank you Firs, thank you, my dear. I'm so glad that you are still alive. Now, Barrault's description of the play is deliberately droll, even ironic. In one sense the play is devoid of drama; in another it is charged with psychological and emotional drama. This, as he knew well, arises not as a function of action, but rather as a function of the non- action that results from a particular set of relationships at a particular moment in Russian history . Freedom, albeit of a very limited sort, was given to the peasantry in 1. Chekhov was born. In his short stories he is concerned above all with the poor and disenfranchised. In his plays, by contrast, his interest is in the impoverished gentrified residents of dilapidated country estates. The drama in The Cherry Orchard centres on how Ranyevskaya and her extended family cope . In my last lecture I considered the notion of the individual in Ibsen's play, A Doll's House. The play created an outrage because it ends with the play's principal female character, Nora, abandoning her husband and children in order, in contemporary language, 'to find herself'. In relation to 'duty', her husband, Helmer, declares, 'First and foremost, you are a wife and mother'. Nora replies, 'That I don't believe any more. I believe that first and foremost I am an individual, just as you are . The family estate, had it been properly managed, would represent accumulated capital. It represents social status. The family also allows for an exploration of the generations and these intersect with class. The old- fashioned servant Firs treats Gayev, his master, as though he were a child. This is a reversal of the patriarchal traditions of earlier Russian literature, where the landowner was depicted as father and the servants as his children. Firs makes the final speech of the play saying, 'When will these young people learn?'' Both Gayev and Ranyevskaya are, of course, in late middle age. The play begins and ends in the nursery and this is, arguably, the heart of the home, where children, mothers (and occasionally fathers), and servants meet. Russian writers have had interesting things to say about childhood and delayed development. Tolstoy, for example, claimed, 'One of the chief causes of the faults of our upper classes is the fact that it takes us so long to get accustomed to the thought that we are grown up. Our entire life till the age of 2. What's so Funny about Losing One's Estate, or Infantilism in . And Pushkin wrote something not dissimilar, . It is hardly a coincidence that all three major male characters in the play - the . As different as these characters may be, they all cling to their puerile identities and refuse to confront the demands of the adult age. Although Lopakhin arguably may seem to be the only . After all, Lopakhin buys the cherry orchard neither for aesthetic nor for practical reasons. Rather, the purchase of the estate represents his desperate and misguided attempt to cope with his traumatic and deprived childhood and to resolve his Oedipus- complex. It is to the male domineering figures of his father and grandfather that he ultimately addresses his drunken speech upon the purchase of the estate: ! My God, the cherry orchard is mine! If my father and my grandfather could rise from their graves and see everything that has happened- -how their Yermolay, their often flogged and half- literate Yermolay, who used to run about barefoot in the winter, how that very Yermolay has bought the most magnificent estate in the world! I bought the estate where my father and grandfather were serfs, where they were not even admitted to the kitchen! I am asleep, I am only day- dreaming, I only imagine it. As Stephen Baehr points out.
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