Antwerp’s STAN company staged it as a surreal comedy, throwing the windowpanes open and letting bright sunlight flood in. How do you let the elegiac moments of loss linger, while giving the fumbling courtships and the bizarre escapes into denial the farcical push they need? Chekhov’s play has recently found lighter touches at no expense to emotional impact.
Anton Chekhov famously insisted it was a comedy, though Konstantin Stanislavsky premiered it as a tragedy. Tom Murphy’s adaptation seems to take the author of The Cherry Orchard at his word. This family crisis is occasionally interrupted by such absurd conclusions, by random updates on troublemaking locals and dead friends, that ping like non-sequiturs. “You’re better off where you are,” says Ranevskaya. “I’ve been asked back to work at the bank. After hearing the details, her brother Leonid speaks up. Somewhere on the majestic Russian estate of Druid’s play, the broke landowner Ranevskaya listens to someone explaining the vast debt burdening her home.
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