Cherry ochard???!
Cherry ochard???
what do you know about this play
Answers:
it actually Orchard not ochard
it's by Anton Chekhov
The grandson of a Russian serf, Chekhov (1860-1904) became a doctor. He wrote satirical sketches as a medical student, moved on to short stories, then to short plays, and finally longer plays. He is noted for realism, and for the subdued passion of his plays: under polite manners and muted conversations, emotional earthquakes erupt. He himself said, "While a family eats their dinner, their lives are collapsing." He saw apathy and social malaise, and he catches his characters like flies in amber, confused victims, apathetic individuals trapped -- like flies in amber -- in the dreary circumstances of an aristocratic social malaise which they are too faint-hearted to rectify.
Chekhov sought change in the stagnant pre-Revolutionary Russian society.
"See how dreary your lives are. Create a better life!" Chekhov admonished.
He did his part by stocking several libraries, sponsoring new roads and housing, providing medical services to peasants, building three schools, and establishing a tuberculosis sanitarium.
The plays are tragicomedies, but in many productions the laughter is forced or disappears into a miasma of depression. Really, it should be brave laughter in the face of tragedy.
Chekhov is counted as a major playwright in the "realistic" mode. He rejected the scenes of major dramatic confrontation which were customary in the melodramas of his day, opting instead for subtlety:
"While a family eats dinner," he observed, "their lives are collapsing."
His plays present the tip of the iceberg, while an audience feels the submerged passions and titanic calamity beneath the surfaces, hidden by politeness, timidity and indifference.
In 1898 he found a wife, and great success in the enormously successful staging of The Seagull (which had failed in a previous production at the Imperial Theatre), and subsequently other of his works by the Moscow Art Theatre, under the incomparable actor and director, Konstantine Stanislavski. Regrettably, he knew by this time that he was suffering from consumption. He was to die only six years later, leaving behind six volumes of work.
Enroute to his funeral, his casket was mistakenly exchanged for that of a general. His cortege was made up of soldiers, while a group of writers paraded unknowingly after the general's coffin. This was, according to fellow playwright Gorki, "cruelly vulgar and incompatible with the memory of a sensitive artist." Chekhov, however, would have laughed, according to his biographer Magarshack. Indeed, the incident encapsulates the theme of much of Chekhov's work: TRAGEDY behind the grin of farce, and LAUGHTER in the face of sadness and death.
Follow these links for more information on Chekhov:
Biography, with notes on the Russian Theatre | Biography |
Website with numerous links by Yvan Russell | Chekhov Papers - Univ of Puget Sound [includes timeline, etc.] |
The Cherry Orchard (1903) was the last of Anton Chekhov's plays. It presents the final days in residence at their estate of the perfectly gracious but wildly impractical Madame Ranevskaya and her family. Wealthy landowners now deeply in debt, these noble gentry have come onto hard times in the period preceding the Communist Revolution in 1917. They try desperately to maintain their aristocratic lifestyle, ignoring an oncoming bourgeoisie juggernaut: the coarse but competent power of an unstoppable new social order. Fading memories of past glory collide with the reality of present chaos, and inescapable confrontation with the politics of a new world.
Lopahin, her practical but peasant-bred neighbor, tries to convince Mme. Ranevskaya to lease her heavily-mortgaged estate to him, enabling him to build summer villas, thus providing her with money on which to survive. She ignores the offer, but he is a harbinger of dire things to come. Ranevskaya and Gaev revere their home as a treasure-house of memory and a pavilion of their lost past. In the great orchard are rooted their pride and their hopes -- the last flowering symbol of their vanishing dreams. Beneath the beloved trees, Ranevskaya strolled with her husband and her young son in happier days. In times past, her brother Gaev pored over billiard balls rather than bills. Unable to face the truth, the elegant but ineffective Madam Ranevskaya is returning from five years' sojourn in Paris as the play opens. She hopes (or deludes herself into believing) that she can secure from friends in France the financing which will see the family through. Times, however, are "a-changing," and eventually the long-held patrimony must be sacrificed at public auction. It is bought by Lopahin, the down-to-earth, down-to-business middle-class merchant whose grandfather (like Chekhov's own) was a serf. When the home is irrevocably lost, Mme. Ranevskaya is too polite to seem to care. Inevitably, however, the family must disperse, and the lovely cherry trees must be hacked down to make space for many more modest dwellings. This is a scenario which has played out countless times in the Greater Washington Area over the past half-century, as one great house after another was made over into rental apartments, and one grand estate after another was "subdivided" into "town houses." One can only imagine the sad fate of these inept innocents as they move out into the newly competitive world.
This play has been called one of the "most heart-breaking comedies in the modern theatre."
NAMES IN RUSSIAN
Russians have three names:
A given name: Lyubov
A patronymic name identifying father: Lyubov Andreyevna (daughter of Andrey)
A surname: Ranevskaya: Madame Ranevskaya
In Chekhov's time, decorum prescribed several proper uses of names:
Title and surname be used for formal relationships: "Madame Ranevskaya"
Given name and patronymic were slightly less formal: "Lyubov Andreyevna"
Given name alone for familiarity: "Lyubov"
Diminutive of the given name for affection or condescension: "Lyuba"
DIAGRAM
[Characters whose names are bracketed are mentioned in the play, but do not appear onstage.]
[A Wealthy Countess in Yaroslavl]
| |
estranged nephew estranged niece
| |
GAEV (51) <-----siblings-- MADAME RANEVSKAYA <------neighbors----- LOPAHIN
(Leonid Andreyevich) (Lyubov Andreyevna) (Yermolay Alexeyevitch)
| a merchant
| <-----he proposes to lease
| Ranevskaya's property to
| build summer rental villas
her three children:
|
* VARYA (24) her adopted daughter, who yearns to marry the merchant, Lopahin
* ANYA (17) her birth daughter
* [GRISHA] (perhaps 9) her son who drowned as a child, five years ago
TROFIMOV, a perpetual student, formerly tutor to the dead Grisha
(Pytor Sergeyevitch)
SEMYONOV-PISHTCHIK, a landowner in some financial distress
EPIHODOV <-----------------------------... to---------------------- DUNYASHA
a clumsy accident-prone a maid
demi-suicidal clerk, beset with misadventures attracted to the
(Semyon Pantalayevitch) valet, Yasha
CHARLOTTA, a governess and amateur magician, daughter of street performers
FIRS (87), a protocol-sensitive valet YASHA, a younger valet
VAGRANT STATIONMASTER
OUTLINE
ACT ONE: The Nursery, just before 3 a.m.
Madame Ranevskaya arrives home in Russia from Paris, where she went five years before, following the death of her husband, and the drowning of her young son. Her daughter, Anya, and Anya's Governess, Charlotta, went some days before to accompany Ranevskaya home. Their neighbor, Lopahin, as well as Epihodov, a clumsy clerk, and the maid Dunyasha, are on hand to greet them. Anya's friend, the student Trofimov, has arrived the day before. Anya's adopted sister, Varya welcomes her. Madame Ranevskaya's talkative brother, Gaev, reports that he is seeking a loan to keep the estate from foreclosure. Lopahin urges brother and sister to take action before the property is sold at auction. He offers to lease the land, clear it, build summer rental villas, and pay the family well. His offer is ignored.
ACT TWO: The Picnic, near Gaev's home, at dusk
Lopahin continues urging Lybuov and Gaev to lease him their estate, but they still make light of his offer. We learn that Ranevskaya was, in Paris, with a lover who spent her money, forcing the sale of her villa, after which he left her for another woman. These down-at-the-heel aristocrats and their guests discuss Russian society as the sun, prophetically, sets.
ACT THREE: The Grand Ball, in the drawing room, night
The family and their guests, dance and enjoy Charlotta's card tricks, seemingly oblivious to their impending fate. The are under the misaprehension that the wealthy great-aunt will give Uncle Gaev money to rescue the estate. Madame Ranevskaya, however, knows that the sum sent by the aunt will not even cover arrears on the mortgage, but she, too, lets herself be pleasantly distracted by the frivolous party. Presently, Uncle Gaev and businessman Lopahin arrive, with the news that the latter has bought the orchard and the family home.
ACT FOUR: The Departure, from the drawing room, stripped of its furnishings, on an October day.
The members of the family bid each other farewell, as they depart for their varied and uncertain destinies. Firs is inadvertently left behind, locked in the house, as the first axes begin to fell the blossom-less, ill-fated cherry trees.
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