What kind of play is The Cherry Orchard? As a new production starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh beckons in Stratford, I am reminded that it is a question people have been asking since the play’s inception. Chekhov himself wrote that what had emerged in his play was “not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce”. Stanislavski, who directed the Moscow premiere in 1904, violently disagreed. “It is a tragedy,” he told Chekhov, “whatever prospect of a better life you hold out in the last act.”
While the debate continues, I hope we shall not be told by anyone involved in the new RSC production that they are at long last restoring the play’s comedy. It is a critical cliche that the British sentimentalise the play and treat it as a lament for the decline and fall of a pseudo-Edwardian aristocracy. In my experience of the play – and I have seen about 20 productions – this is simply untrue. We generally do The Cherry Orchard very well because its blend of styles and moods is something baked into our own dramatic heritage. Eschewing the academic formality of the French, for whom tragedy and comedy are rigidly defined genres, we are used to a glorious impurity in drama: a culture that can produce Twelfth Night should have no problem in comprehending The Cherry Orchard.
