ABSTRACT
. . .The play is a study of the dry rot which often overtakes landed families. The cherry orchard, the fairyland of generations of children, passes into the hands of a well-to-do merchant whose father worked on it as a serf. He stands for efficiency, but, like Mr. Salteena, is not quite a gentleman. The family is inefficient through and through, a group of ‘half-bakes’, or to put it more precisely, since their ancestors made a large income out of the orchard, where the fruit now hangs or drops unheeded, a family that has ‘come unstuck!’ Their friends are just as fatuous and more grotesque. The only person of any moral fibre is the semi-senile aged family retainer, and when all clear out to Paris, Moscow, or what not, he is forgotten. The curtain falls on him shuffling in from his sick bed only to find himself locked in the now deserted and shortly to be demolished house. From the orchard comes the sound of the axe cutting down the cherry trees - an operation suspended by request until the family has gone. This is the only palpable situation of the piece.
