Arts

Replanting the cherry orchard

John Russell

New York rhe Cherry Orchard is a great many people's Favourite play, and every one of those people IS convinced that he or she knows how it Should be done.

This being so, there was a good deal of Premonitory commotion when it was made knovvn that Andrei Serban was to direct The Cherry Orchard at the Vivian Beaumont , 'heater in New York with Irene Worth as Madame Ranevskaya. After her appearance in Sweet Bird of Youth Miss Worth won the ,fc'na Award for the best performance by a leading actress in the 1975-76 season on Broadway. Among that limited but fervent audience which still pays attention to radio drama she caused a great stir with her performance in a new three-character play by Edward Albee called Listening; and al'Enough the sixty-minute version of Flannery o'Connors Displaced Person which she Made for television has not been seen by the Public there are rumours that once again she Was in a class of her own. Altogether, she is at this moment the actress whom New "ricers most want to see. But how could they get to see her ? That w, as the question. She was known to be intransigence personified. Project after project was said to have been turned down with Contumely Backers, producers, directors, authors: all were felled as if with an axe if they did not come up to her standards. If door, garbage was brought in at the 4,,,,00r, she tossed it out of the window. 'tooted masterpieces foundered at the discussion stage. She would do what she wanted, and do it with the people she waL Ted, or she would not do anything at all. t meanwhile Andrei Serban was planning ° leave the United States, quite possibly for ver' and go back to Europe. People who rad seen his staging of Electra and The thr°j" Women were very sorry, but none of seemed able to do much about it. nose of us who were neither money-people cir theatre-people were beginning to settle the memory of an evening in which we ta,d. witnessed the rebirth of language, the .Zn'th of theatre, and the rebirth of sound. h ho could forget that collective ringing of „an,. d-bells which signified at the end of etra that the world had been cleansed, and ourselves with it ?

Still

Memories don't pay any bills. Had it not been for that most agile and trustful of 'rePrerteurs, Mr Joseph Papp, Andrei rbatt would now be in France and Irene t)I-th would quite possibly be stalking the museums with that special contained fury Which she reserves for periods of enforced Mr Papp has his detractors, but it is cult for an English resident in Man

hattan not to feel that as far as the theatre is concerned Mr Papp operates as a kind of one-man unsubsidised Arts Council. No one has a sharper eye for a commercial success : Hair and A Chorus Line are two examples of Mr Papp's clairmayance in that respect. He has a sense of social mission: witness his twenty-one years of free Shakespeare in the summer, witness the eighty-one new plays put on since 1967 at the Public Theatre on Lafayette Street, witness the prizewinning productions of plays by black and Puerto Rican playwrights. And at Lincoln Center, where neither the Vivian Beaumont Theatre nor the Mitzi E, Newhouse Theater had quite found their definitive identity, Mr Papp is feeling his way towards a free-form, unofficial and never-to-be-christened National Theater.

Like a lot of other intelligent Americans, Joseph Papp doesn't care for the words 'National Theater.* They seem to him to stand for the kind of centralised, bureaucratised, adventureless death-in-life which has overtaken many a once-great theatre in Europe. But need that rule out the dream of a great classical theatre company ? The location is there, the plays exist, the actors are somewhere around, the public would like nothing better. At the Brooklyn Academy that most convinced of anglophiles, Harvey Lichtenstein, has the Royal Shakespeare Company in mind as a model on which to base a classical repertory company (due to open this spring). But although Joseph Papp knows a good English play when he sees one—David Rudkin's Ashes is one of his current successes--he also likes to follow his own fancy and see where it leads him. So he asked Andrei Serban to go ahead with The Cherry Orchard, and with the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, and see what came of it,

The Agamemnon is still ahead of us, but The Cherry Orchard is on-the whole a great success with the critics and a great success with the public, Mr Serban did certain things in it that have never been so well done before, and he also did others which are self-evidently right but which only he would have thought of. He is a great master for instance of concerted movement; and when the returned travellers and their attendants come swarming into the nursery not long after the beginning of the play we catch our breath in wonder at the speed, the assurance and the unaffected

animation with which they come flooding across the stage. He is also a great master of those wordless sounds which cannot be called 'speech* and yet cut most deeply into our awareness. An instance of this occurs in Act IV, when Lopakhin throws away his last chance to propose to

Varya: Chekhov does not give Varya anything to say at this point, but we shall never forget the sound which Miss Priscilla Smith calls forth from her inmost being.

The play looks beautiful throughout, and it also sounds beautiful at every moment at which Miss Elizabeth Swa.dos is called upon to invent anything from a single note, blown or plucked, to the dense and sinister dancemusic (performed by the combination which Chekhov prescribes) which structures the action in Act III. Mr Serban has a painter's eye, and he cannot put so much as an old suitcase on the stage without making a memorable image. He does not hesitate to go beyond naturalism, as when for instance the rear wall of the stage seems to vanish from sight and we suddenly see the cherry orchard itself, white with the early morning frost and alive with people walking or running beneath its branches. Nothing that he does is ever taken from stock. Even the scene-change between Acts III and IV is memorable for the way in which a huge white floor-cloth balloons across the stage and is tucked into place before our eyes.

Other wordless moments come to mind. Himself a homeless exile, Mr Serban can show us just one person sitting on her luggage in Act IV and make us see in her the emblem of a complete society in dissolution. When Gayev runs back and forth at the back of the stage in that same act, with his knees held high, he communicates a sense of pointless and belated energy which is a part of the character but has never been made so vivid before. And when Madame Raneyskaya says her adieux to the house she does not merely look round: she runs round, faster and ever faster, with an ever more audible intake of breath, as if she could store the house within her as the body takes in oxygen.

But the trouble is that in Chekhov the words also matter. Mr Serban is a great sound-man, but as a word-man he hardly begins to exist. The Cherry Orchard is played out at close quarters among people —most of whom have known one another for ever—who have in common a language, a sense of nuanced speech, and a specific and inherited sense of behaviour. Chekhov knew exactly what he was doing With them, and his engineerings are virtually indestructible. But they do go awry if half the actors cannot handle language at all and are given no help by the director, While others are encouraged to go off on tacks of their own. The result of this is that the play is beautiful to look at but has no inner consistency. Miss Worth as Madame Ranovsky does many wonderful things, all evening long. Every speech is just right, every possible delicate consideration is shown to everyone else on the stage, often she pulls the whole production together by the sheer rightness of her presence. And no doubt we in London are spoilt : if we have seen Laughton as Lopakhin, Quartermaine and Gielgud as Gayev, Angelina Stepanova as Charlotta (Moscow Arts, 1958) and many another unforgettable ensemble performance, it is difficult to chime with a produc tion in which busyness is all, so often, and the flawless tuning of one performance against another is beyond human capacities.

And then so much that seems wrong is quite simply gratuitous. We know perfectly well, for instance, what Chekhov wanted us to see in Act II. He wanted us to see 'far far away on the horizon the outlines of a large town that is visible only in clear and very fine weather.' He did not want the entire rear of the stage to be dominated by an industrial acropolis, ablaze with light, that looks like Pittsburgh in the heyday of Henry Clay Frick. 'If a train can be shown without sound, without a single noise, go to it,' he wrote to Stanislavsky. What he certainly did not want is the elaborate dumbshow of bowed peasants hauling a wooden plough which Mr Serban has devised. The words do the work, if they are allowed to.

But when all that has been said, this was an evening in which great natures were at work and exasperation lost out, in the end, to wonder and awe.