When he staged the Macbeth-Hamlet-Othello trilogy – also performed in Bucharest in last year’s edition of the Shakespeare Festival – Eimuntas Nekrošius betrayed Shakespeare by enshrouding him with an infinite delicacy in an air of Checkovian sadness and sinking him into the boundless abyss of the Slavonic spirit. At the Sibiu International Theater Festival, Lithuanian Nekrošius, considered one of the most important names in contemporary European theater staging, made his appearance with a Chekhov play this time.
The Cherry Orchard, an International Stanislavski Foundation and Meno-Fortas Theater (Vilnius) co-production was staged in Moscow with Russian actors who played in Russian. But when the curtain rose over Nekrošius’ Orchard, behind it we didn’t discover Chekhov’s world, a world permeated by sadness and unspoken tales – as Stanislavski led the path and most directors followed – but the world of another Chekhov, a Chekhov turned towards his inner self, the mirror of his own words revealing the colored and slightly askewed reflection of his own universe. This is neither a comedy – as the playwright wrote under the title of the play – nor drama, as most directors have decoded scenically, directors who have soard towards Liubov Andreyevna’s ravaged soul where the cherry trees had grown old long before they were cut by the arising society. It is rather a moving photograph of his intimate thoughts, forever gliding and sinking, with every image, into the devouring subconscious, in order to be later turned into gestures whose meanings remain only halfway disclosed. Therefore, when the curtain rises, we chords from Mahler’s stormy Symphony No. 1, and old Firs welcome us; Firs, the lackey resembling a wandering monk among people, arranging clothes and dusting them, alone on stage, just him and the music. Time deliciously and gradually expands, moments become thousands of years and years become moments, the dust rises and falls again… Thought out as a small ritual, the opening scene is the key that magically opens the door to a story that tells the neverending Story: happiness and innocence play their parts in the first two acts, then they slowly die away in the third act, under the ardent sun of existential truths which fling and break the crystal globe that had been their bed, kindly and desperately dying, ghastly in their resignation in the fourth act. The road from paradise to the Faall, from childhood to death is so short and yet so long, a mere play on a stage set beforehand for a play with a predictable ending. And Firs recedes into the background making room for the actors to enter the performance…
Chekhov’s characters inhabit their own universe and everyone takes his place. We are still at the beginning; the sand in the hour glass has yet to flow, and time sits comfortably in the kingdom of innocence. Chekhov wouldn’t have had anything to reproach Nekrošius for the first two acts. He respected his intructions to the letter. The Cherry Orchard is a four-act comedy. And humor graciously starts to ripple among words and gestures from the first moments when the stage – Firs’ empty and musty kingdom- becomes populated as in Sleeping Beauty when the spell is broken. A single thorn discreetly turns the image bloody. The flower bouquet is set on Liubov Andreyevna’s chest as if in a dice with death. As a warning, as an omen broken in thousands of crocks by the three girls’ laughter (Anya, Duniasha and Varya) who will build together the sandcastle of happiness. For now, it’s their time. They sing, dance, laugh, dream, they play at love, they built, they crush – with a cruelty only innocence entitles them to – rainbows of happiness. Anya, like a childhood angel with rabbit’s ears, Duniasha, strong and serious, touching in her sobriety so easily melted in Anya and Varya’s looks. Varya whom Nekrošius envisions as every female character in the history of theater, giving her something of Goldoni’s columbines, of the madonna angelicata and a bit of Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Juliet, in order to bring her back in the end to a world she belongs in, in order to make her more Chekhovian than all of Chekhov’s characters. But time passes and the orchard is growing old… And along with it Liubov Andreyevna’s gloom, so well disguised behind a motionless face where love slowly makes its appearance, discreetly watched by the torment which the Great Lossm the Orchard, will induce.
If the candescent force of the three children-women dominates the first two acts, the next two are gradually darkening in Ranevskaya and Lopakhin’s haze. Innocence is fading away with each momengt, every gesture losing itself in utter darkness. These are two world colliding, breaking – in the whirl of their plunge into destruction and self-destruction – every waterfront raised by innocence. Ranevskaya’s soul bears every cheery tree root in the orchard, and Lopakhin holds the hatchet. The orchard will be cut down, but the roots will rot inside and everything will be lost. The tension builds up fastter and faster, the rythm becomes more and more alert as the disaster approaches. Time is running out and despair turns to sound. The great death, destruction enter the stage through bird chirp which amplifies to madness, a tormenting, foul, metallic chirping, heavy as an axe chopping down tree trunks. This is the moment Nekrošius kills time and, along with it, the orachard, childhood, innocente, past and future, the entire world. The road back is now closed.
What follows? Silence. The metallic, death-headed sound has gone. Beyond it, emptiness descends and time prepares to become hinged, as in Hamlet. The traces must disappear, Lopakhin cleans up and everybody must leave. Even Varya… Varya, his path to their world, never found… But nobody can leave. In the end – their souls heavy – they go away, take a step back and remain there, shielded by their own shadows. A pair of rabbit-angel ears and a grove of windmilss bear witness to a long abandoned toy paradise.
Old Firs remains alone on stage, yet again, accompanied by Mahler’s music…
Written by Monica Andronescu
Translated by Alina-Olimpia Miron, MTTLC, 2nd year
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