Well, did Chekhov break his own rule?
“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.”
The Cherry Orchard had 2 characters walking around with guns - that never go off.
That was Chekhov’s last play. Evidently, he wrote thousands of letters, plus articles and essays, and he many times talked about guns that don’t go off - so probably his audience had heard of his opinions…and then he left both guns silent!
I read about that in a book called, Anton Chekhov: A life by a Chekhov scholar named Donald Rayfield. Mr. Rayfield read everything available that Chekhov ever wrote! He paired the action-less guns with the passion-less characters. “Only the mistress of the house, who comes to Russia from her lover in France and leaves again, is a sexual being. Nobody else expresses ardour, any more than Charlotta’s rifle or Epikhodov’s revolver ever fire.” The implication is that breaking his own rule became a giant, frustrating, clear message about impotence and wasted energy.
Wait until your last and greatest play to break your most famous rule. I like it.
That above photo is from the 1988 Peter Brook production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. While not as extreme as Jaime Lloyd’s productions, Peter Brook was the modern master of simplicity. He kept the guns in his production, but got rid of most everything else.
We are talking about set pieces as central metaphors…this play is called The Cherry Orchard…
I don’t see any Cherry Orchard, do you? Donald Rayfield said that the original script has the trees listed as a character. I just looked at 17 English translations, and the trees weren’t in the cast list. Did Peter Brook know? I guess it is the title of the show. If The Seagull can work without a seagull, maybe The Cherry Orchard can work without a cherry orchard?
Peter Brook kept the guns, and nixed the cherry orchard. So, keep the silly, funny, ugly metaphor of these people, and ditch the beautiful one?
Maybe Peter Brook thinks that people are more beautiful than trees.
Maybe these actors are so wonderful that you don’t need a big set piece as a metaphor to help the audience ‘get it’.
I needed the trees when I first read The Cherry Orchard. In fact, I needed the trees explained to me by a set designer to ‘get it’. He happened to have a mother descended from Russians with money enough to have a family photo in front of an orchard; and a father whose parents were the US’s version of serfs. So, the past and future of the play.
The set designer’s serf-turned-academic father was a social justice warrior of the labor organizing variety - like the revolutionary student Trofimov in the play. That family was not pre-disposed to mourn the passing of an era of aristocrats.
Nevertheless, the set designer mourned those trees. And those people in their white lace and linen. I don’t have a copy of that photo. I hope that brilliant designer will design a Cherry Orchard one day, and we will see that struggle onstage.
I think that Peter Brook never saw a set design that captured the experience of being in the company of trees.
Better to omit something subpar. It will make that last moment, when the trees get cut down, misfire. We won’t mourn their loss as much as we should.
Many people considered Peter Brook’s Cherry Orchard to be the most successful production to date. So, I’m sure he was right.
Most theaters will not be able to assemble an acting and directing team like Peter Brook’s. He passed away in 2022 at 96 years old. So, we don’t even get to ask him how to do it well. If the rest of us are not quite as good as those actors, and not quite as good as Peter Brook, which metaphors should we keep?
If we do as Chekhov says, then every item must have relevance to the story.
I have a great artist to look at tomorrow. This painter thinks humans and trees are the most beautiful subjects, and equally beautiful and poignant.
The set designer I mentioned above would have been able to talk Peter Brook into an orchard with a beautiful model. and, if Peter Brook got to work with tomorrow’s artist, we would have seen an orchard on stage.