1) In a cultural moment of weakness, your humble Gote spent Saturday evening at the Theatre, haggling with the evil usher lady about whether or not checking his "outerwear" was truly necessary (apparently so) and then being ignored by the despicable garderobe lady who failed to see that he was indeed waiting in line and didn't butt in there like any old lady at the post-office.
The real disappointment of the evening, however, was how boring and pointless Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is/was. Reminds me of Eugene Mirman's parody of a certain slice of the young Brooklyn population: "Oh, New York is so hard, wawawa." Except more in the key of "the landed gentry is being forced to abandon its untenable, antiquated, exploitative ways and wrapping it up in the nauseating aura of family values, nostalgia for a better time, and romantic love." As the kids used to say: gag me with a spoon. I think I prefer Ibsen. At least his characters were just plain old bat-shit crazy. A way better image.
2) I forgot what my other important opinion was. But it's finally gotten colder here, so the ground is super slippery (black ice!) and looks like it is paved with a layer diamonds. Sparkly, sparkly snow falling from the sky looks like mini strobe lights on a Saturday night. Ready-made outdoor disco for one.
Use your imagination for this one.
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6 comments:
Dude, whose production did you see?! (I'm not saying even the best production could make you like stupid characters/plot, but I'm just curious).
Apropos lines - I TOLD you that's how it goes!
"Ready-made outdoor disco for one" - MasterGote, you are the greatest poet in the land.
MXAT. What would that mean? I'm not so versed. They also made a really big point of having Lyuba cross all the daughters during the last scene where they are leaving the house, which felt icky religious, and then there was no sound of woodsmen at the end. Please diagnose.
1) I'm gonna be a nit-picky bitch: It's MXT now. The idiots changed their name cause they didn't want to be "Academic" anymore. (I assume you went to the old MXAT in Kamergersky per., right?!)
2) I THINK it means that what you saw was a very conservative, classic staging. MXT has a purchase on Chekhov that way, what with the Seagull being their logo and all. Some of the acting should have been good? They do have a good ensemble... I wasn't crazy about the one thing of theirs I've seen there - a Tom Stoppard play - but that too was due to the play itself, not the acting.
Of the famous Chekhov plays, The Cherry Orchard is the one I've never read or seen, so I can't say what the ending meant... It does seem like the sound of woodsmen would have been important if Chekhov wrote it in. I'm stumped, though.
(Btw, you probably don't want more Chekhov, but if you like the Seagull any better than The Cherry Orchard, I liked the staging at the Teatr Shkola Sovremennoi P'esy (http://www.neglinka29.ru/) a lot...
I love the diamond ground, but I'll add that I've also got a soft spot for the Cherry Orchard, maybe my favorite of the Cheshire Chekhov's plays. It sounds like the reading you saw was one-sided against Yermolay and in favor of the aristocracy, which I don't think is the way the play actually reads. Yes, there is some sadness at the passing of the old world, but really it's about the necessity of that progress. Lyuba and her brother are sort of fools who insist on running away from problems, either in travel or in billiards, and who speak as though with virtue but who are terrified by the entrance of an actual peasant on their property and who have let the orchard itself fall into stagnation, a past that is no longer tenable or productive, as once, the old servant tells us, it was.
OK, I'm rambling on. But I'm still curious about the sound effects situation. One, the chopping wood sounds at the end are awesome and serve as a drumbeat for the future but also as a heartbeat of the dying. Was there a cable-snapping sound from the mines? That's a powerful image of how the masses are subjugated by a purposefully-delusional aristocracy. It sometimes gets repeated in the closing of the play as a sign of the aristocracy's grip collapsing.
Other than the above, which is more an apology for your version being bad, there are some things I really like about the play. I like Yermolay's character a lot, the question about whether he buys the orchard to save the family or to exact his revenge on it. And I like the class questions that he and Varya and their assumed relationship represents. Also, I like that the play realizes total tragedy (ie, everyone's sad at the end) without anyone dying (except, in some productions, the old servant), which is an interesting shift from the Shakespearean form to a more modern one. I wonder when that transition happened.
kg - thanks for the recommendation, I'll be sure to check that one out, though looks like they're doing something else right now.
But I'm not sure about the name change - their website still refers to them as MXAT, so maybe they took it back? That surely would be silly (both the changing and the taking back).
Either way, it was indeed a pretty conservative (not a very risky or imaginative) staging. I think Abe is right - they did make Yarmolay out to be the bad guy, what with buying them out and not marrying the daughter, how dare he? Which I guess what rubbed me the wrong way - they didn't bother to explore why he would do such "hurtful" things, why he himself might be ambivalent about them, and instead just made him seem like he had a stick up his butt and an undeserved sense of entitlement ("he's out there making money").
But Abe, you make a great case for reading the play itself and looking for that ambivalence between progress and rootedness. Consider it on the list. And, I am well impressed by your memory for character names and plot details (and though I do realize the internets are full of such information, I would not be surprised if it had not been necessary).
1) Apropos their name: serious identity crisis. This is at the bottom of the main page:
МХТ им. Чехова, 2001—2008
mxat@theatre.ru
Камергерский пер., д. 3
The history page (http://art.theatre.ru/english/history/) says that they were founded as Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, became "Academic" in 1919, and returned to their original name (which was news to anyone with living memory of the place) in 2004.
As for substance - Abe's commentary does make me wanna read the play, which any self-respecting Russian or even half-Russian should do anyway.
And if you're looking for even more Chekhov, Sovremennik's The Three Sisters is very respectable (Chulpan Khamatova is in it, and she's their biggest young-ish star), but looong.
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