ABSTRACT
. . .Mr. Tyrone Guthrie's production of ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is first-rate, and to be remembered gratefully with his ‘King John’. Once again he is helped by an admirable cast without a weak tail and by the settings of Mr. Frederick Crooke (in these two very different productions Mr. Crooke has proved himself without a rival on the English stage today). Nostalgia, too much nostalgia, is the danger that threatens every producer of ‘The Cherry Orchard’ if the savage critical core of Chekhov's work is ignored: between the lovely opening when Mme. Ranevska and her daughter Anya return just before dawn to the old family house after their long railway journey: the coffee, the long tired yawns, the going to bed in daylight; and the last departure with the dust-sheets on the furniture, the shrouded rocking-horse, the old servant forgotten, and the sound of the cherry trees falling under the axe. Into our old nineteenth-century theatre, with its melodramas and adulteries and the morality of the endless Sundays, the play broke like youth - with some of the freshness and lyricism of ‘Twelfth Night’. But there lies the trap, for Chekhov's work is not young: it is as old as the strange land from which it emerged: it is bleached with the doctor's memory of cholera, of interminably suffering peasants; twisted by sickness, boredom reels towards Yalta to die. In spite of a curiously wrong programme-note - which seems to accept the optimism at its face-value - Mr. Guthrie realises that. His production is fine and nervy. Watch the eternal student (interestingly made-up to look like Chekhov himself and very well acted by Mr. Walter Hudd) scratch his bottom while he boasts about mankind. See the tired broken Gaev lift his nose like an old war-horse at the click of billiard balls, and in the last scene the absurd governess, Charlotta, sprawl like a discarded ventriloquist's doll in the corner of the about-to-be-abandoned room. It is these little moments, flashes of individual insight, which make a play fresh however often we see it. But a producer needs actors, and the highest tribute we can pay this cast is that there is not a member of it who is not worthy of the producer. . . .
