NT : Go Backstage : Platform Papers : Trevor Nunn
Trevor Nunn
Trevor Nunn talks about The Cherry Orchard
31 October 2000, Lyttelton Theatre
Jack Bradley: So to Chekhov and the inevitable question: Summerfolk last year, The Cherry Orchard this. What is it about these Russians?
Trevor Nunn: I set up a production of The Cherry Orchard long before I thought of revisiting Summerfolk. This came about because I worked with Vanessa Redgrave on Heartbreak House, which of course is Shaw's tribute to Chekhov and which in turn demonstrates that Shaw hadn't quite understood Chekhov, but that's another matter – Vanessa and I had a wonderful time together (this was several years ago), and I said to her that the next step should be to work on the play that Heartbreak House was based on. So it was entirely pragmatic and practical, the idea of doing the production, not a conceptualist's dream. Indeed, I can't claim to be a theorist or conceptualist about Chekhov at all. It's only the second Chekhov play that I've done and I feel myself to be in the relationship of a student with Chekhov, of learning about him and learning from the experience of doing. I did Summerfolk last year because it's one of the great ensemble plays of all time and because it seemed to me that Summerfolk would appear to be very, very different at the end of the twentieth century than it did when it was first revived in this country twenty-five years ago. The outcome of the great Russian turbulence, the great Russian journey towards the ideal society was still then to some extent unknown.
Having directed Summerfolk, I came to realise just how precisely Gorky's play was a response to, or even, one might say, a riposte, to Chekhov's play. Chekhov and Gorky were great friends, friends in the way of teacher and pupil. Chekhov was vastly celebrated and Gorky was a young hothead, but by the time Gorky wrote Lower Depths and it was presented by the Moscow Art Theatre, the two of them had bonded together and had passionate conversations about the future of their country. I think there's a sense in which the character of Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard owes a lot to Chekhov's perception of the young Gorky; somebody who sees solutions, who believes that a great deal must be swept away before these solutions will take root. It was extraordinary to do Gorky's play, recognising how much of it was directly contradicting or impatient with The Cherry Orchard. I suppose the most obvious point of comparison is that Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard explains the future for the Gaevs' huge estate: it should be sold and the land divided into parcels and on each plot of land there should be a dacha or a summer cottage, which would be bought by “summerfolk”, that is by people who work in town but who need to spend their summers in the country, commuting between town and country – the new middle class lifestyle. On two occasions Lopakhin talks, at one moment drunkenly, and at another almost deliriously, about the future in happy terms for these people. “This is going to be the new Russia”, he says, “this is the way it's going”. But Gorky says, “I'll tell you what life is like for these summerfolk”. He accuses them of being 'I'm alright Jack' monsters; people who say “I've made a little bit of money, I've got enough to buy a summer dacha and I don't care anything for the rest of society. I'm going to pull the ladder up behind me”. Gorky says, these appalling people are monsters. So it was fascinating for me to direct The Cherry Orchard having already worked on Summerfolk.JB: So you did the postscript first. You describe yourself as a student of Chekhov, so the question that immediately arises is, how do you do your prep? Generally, how do you prepare for a production?
TN: The first answer, of course, is to do with the preparation of a version. Since I don't speak Russian (just seem to have omitted that from my education), I am completely in the hands of those people who translate or make versions of the original texts. Of course I read several existing translations and the first thing that struck me is the vast variations there are between version and version. There is a danger too that you compare version with version and you choose solutions as if from a bag of liquorice all-sorts: “I like that bit,... and I like the way he's translated that.... Oh I don't like that, but that's nice...”. Of course if one proceeded in that way one would arrive at a text full of bonbons but nothing of coherence. A couple of years ago, I went to see a production of Uncle Vanya at the Young Vic and I was very, very struck by the simplicity and the purity of the version, having previously seen a number. I thought there was something unusual in the choice of idiom – I could believe that late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century people were talking, but there was no quaintness; there was no 'fabricated' old fashioned language. And there was no strained Russian-ness. So I immediately contacted the writer David Lan and said “I'm doing a production of The Cherry Orchard and can you do a new version of that play?” Happily, he accepted the same day.
We talked and exchanged responses to the play and then David made this equally pure and equally truthful version, which does differ in many crucial respects from others. Having got David's version, I urged the company not to bring other translations into the rehearsal room. We stayed with David's text pretty much totally. Of course you read related books when you are doing a Chekhov, and you can't resist the temptation of reading Stanislavsky's account of directing the play; reading about the tempestuous time that Chekhov had with Stanislavsky and vice versa. Stanislavsky really lost his temper; he thought the production was going wonderfully until Chekhov turned up and said “It's all absolutely wrong, I didn't mean this seriousness at all. It's a comedy;...and take out all those ghastly sound effects.” Of course one is fascinated by that debate, and there's a prompt book of the Stanislavsky version that one can read and attempt to unpick. It's bewildering at times, the sheer number of his sound effects; vastly more than anything we included. You begin to sympathise with Chekhov. But then I think one has to let all that research go.I've read a lot of Chekhov short stories over the years; Chekhov is the inventor of the naturalistic drama as we know it. But he's regarded in Russia as a poet as well as a dramatist especially in the short stories. I think the appraisal of Chekhov in Russia is that he is a symbolist as well as a naturalist, and never more so than in The Cherry Orchard. The title is a give away, isn't it? The future of The Cherry Orchard (which is the name of the estate or of the house) is what is being debated or haggled over. So there is the symbol of the orchard. At one point Trofimov says, “All Russia is our orchard”. Then there is the symbol of the house, the huge house with so many rooms that it's possible for somebody like Firs to get lost in it and to be left behind. A place that's impractically large, so many rooms, so many territories within it; so there's a sense in which the house represents something of Russia. Not a hard and fast symbol but there is a kind of evocation going on.And then there are all sorts of other symbols in the play that have been argued over for generations, like “the string breaking”. Chekhov doesn't introduce that sound by accident. We use the translation of Chekhov's stage direction on the poster, “It's as though there came from the sky the sound of a string breaking, then dying away mournfully”. He uses exactly the same phrase again as the very last stage direction of the play; that is, he wants the same thing to happen twice. What does he mean by “a string breaking”? Does he intend us to think, quite precisely, of an industrial accident, which is one way it is explained, that a cable broke somewhere in a mine shaft beneath the earth; but then he also says it comes “from the sky”? Two characters in the play say, it's like a bird, it's like an owl. I think he's describing something complex, haunting, melancholy, alarming. He places it again at the end of the play – he wants it to have a symbolic presence for us. He wants it to say that the moment has come, with that string breaking, when things will never be the same again. An ultimate moment has come. But the sound contains natural things too, and it contains despair, melancholy, dread, fear. So Chekhov the symbolist is as important as Chekhov the naturalist. JB: But if the symbolist element in his writing is deliberately ambivalent or ambiguous, the thing he is renowned for is undoubtedly his naturalism, and I'm interested in how that translates in rehearsal of the play and in finding the play.
TN: Well, I did what I would with any complex play. One of the most enjoyable things in the theatre, is to be with a group of actors around a big table and to read and read and talk and discuss and investigate every possibility of meaning within a text. That also means looking at references, reading background, sharing anecdotes and so on. It can take a week, it can take longer, until I feel that all the ground of the play has been turned over and so that myriad possibilities have been identified. We don't have to take any decisions; that's what's wonderful about that part of the process. Then I enjoy moving to the improvisational stage. Not improvisation in the Stanislavskian sense, setting up situations within the play and asking actors to rework those situations in their own words; but improvising to investigate character and specifically to investigate a day in the life of each of the characters, the physical life and so on. Very gradually we arrive at interaction between the characters, always coming back to the text and reminding ourselves of all the textual evidence, not only in terms of character but also of the symbolic space that each of the characters occupy.
In simple terms, there is Ranevskaya, an extraordinarily charming absentee landlord, a vast problem for Russian society of the late nineteenth century. There is Gaev, a man who describes himself as “a man of the eighties”, an aristocrat who was nevertheless part of a libertarian movement, wanting to reach out towards the peasants he owned. Lopakhin is one of those summerfolk, his background is exactly like the characters in Gorky's play; he's had a peasant upbringing but he's now an entrepreneur, somebody who's on course to make a million. He has much more wealth than the people who own this house that he remains in awe of. I could go on throughout the whole cast list of characters, but they each occupy a precise space, each contributes something to the debate about “whither Russia?” Where have we come from? What did giving freedom to the peasants actually mean? Firs says it was a disaster from which they've never recovered, Trofimov believes that it was the beginning of the new age. So, where does that debate take us in terms of Russia's future? Chekhov wrote the play in 1904 and in 1905 the first 'revolution' started. So his prediction wasn't wrong. Of course the play is not only about Russia; it's about how in any age, we can sense great seismic social shifts; they can frighten us and they can excite us. How do we stand in relation to recent history? Where are we headed in the future?
JB: That leads one inevitably into the debate between Chekhov and Stanislavsky, as to what is the tone of the thing? Implicit in the way that you describe it is, one senses, the immense humanism that Chekhov has, his incapacity not to see the empathetic side of everybody.
TN: Yes, he writes each character as if through their own eyes, doesn't he? He allows each character to see the world from their own point of view and then he allows interaction to take place. I don't think Chekhov invented that, because that's what Shakespeare does. Shakespeare is also a great humanist. Shakespeare number one, Chekhov number two! Their astonishing breadth as dramatists, their capacity to see sympathetically through the eyes of people who, under any other circumstances, they might dislike or disdain. So yes, Chekhov is a great humanist, and Chekhov is never didactic.
JB: And wonderfully non-judgmental.
TN: To answer your question about tone: when Chekhov kept insisting, “this is a comedy”, he obviously didn't mean a farcical comedy; he doesn't really mean a comedy in the twentieth-century sense, but I think he does mean a comedy of foible, of obsession, of recognition, of human oddity, human wickedness. And up to the last few moments of the play we can feel it's a comedy in the sense that it isn't a tragedy. Everybody thinks they are going off to a new life of one kind or another. But then the staggering selfishness, the blinkeredness of the characters impacts on us as we realise that Firs has been left behind and is incarcerated. In a sense it's a comic irony that he can't go anywhere else, there isn't any other place for Firs. He too is a symbolic figure: the old peasant servant who wants the status quo to remain undisturbed forever.
JB: The tragedy for him would be if he left. And now we have time for questions.
Audience member: I always understood that Chekhov's irritation with Stanislavsky was because he did not believe it was a comedy?
TN:Yes, that seems to be the case. Chekhov was irritated by many things he observed in his production, but he did repeatedly say: this is a comedy. And I think many people working on subsequent productions, and all of us working on this production, have some sympathy with Stanislavsky. We all secretly fear Chekhov coming into our rehearsal room and saying, “You're doing exactly the same as Stanislavski!” But I've also come across productions (a Russian production relatively recently), that took literally Chekhov's instruction that the play must be presented as a comedy and therefore turned everything into slapstick and buffoonery, and that's not to be borne.
Audience member: You mentioned that you find Chekhov a wonderfully non-judgmental writer, but there's a comment in David Lan's introduction that implies he thinks Chekhov is judgmental. He says that The Cherry Orchard is the harshest play he knows; he finds its bitter anger striking – Chekhov is banging away against the stupidity of the Gaev family. Do you disagree with that comment, because your production seemed to be taking a more melancholic, less judgmental view?
TN: It seems to me that Chekhov provides a great deal of space for Ranevskaya's grief. She is literally pole-axed by Lopakhin's joyous announcement that he is the new owner of the cherry orchard. Chekhov describes Ranevskaya steadying herself against a chair and then slumping into it, unable to participate in the rest of the conversation. I think he wants us to notice that. When Lophakin yells at her, “Why didn't you listen to me?”, he is in part yelling at himself. He feels guilt about his actions, he feels that he has misled her. I think Chekhov is predicting that what happens to the Gaev family will happen to such aristocrats everywhere. It is a sociological or political inevitability. It is an impossibility for people from such a nineteenth- and indeed eighteenth-century tradition to adjust to the huge shifts that are going to take place in the twentieth century, and he was not wrong.
Audience Member (Gitta Sereny): In your research on Chekhov, did you find that Chekhov was as friendly toward the servants as you suggest in your production? I have seen, when I was extremely young, a production of The Cherry Orchard where this was exactly the opposite. I sympathise entirely with yours. I think this is the right thing, but I don't know if this was Chekhov or if this was you? In Reinhardt's production the servants were constantly bobbing, curtsying, bowing.TN: Chekhov writes very specifically and therefore doesn't generalise about these relationships. Ranevskaya, when she returns and sees Firs, uses words that are pretty much untranslatable – I think in our version it's “My countryman” – she uses a word that is as if she is calling the old man “Russia, my fellow Russian”. She also uses very strong endearments to Firs, so that the sense is that he is part of her family, there is an enormous affection and regard in her language. Quite oppositely, it's clear that Yasha, who is now described as her valet, who is a peasant boy who has travelled with her to Paris and then been promoted, now expects to be treated as a house guest more than as a servant. That is made very clear at the outset: “Yasha expects to eat what we eat; he sits at the same table when we eat in a restaurant”. He doesn't permit himself a lowlier place. In this production we made it clear that Yasha remains in the room when a more sensitive servant would feel it was appropriate to remove himself. He sits down with the owners of the house with a slightly shocking familiarity, especially to Gaev. But this behaviour in this production derives directly from the text. Dunyasha uses terminology to Anya that is very affectionate. She uses exuberant words like “my dearest darling”; but Anya scarcely responds. Anya, who surely we think of as being a girl with whom we can really identify – she's impressionable, she's youthful, she's courageous – is bored by Dunyasha's exaggerations. The text is very precise. There are no simple generalisations to be made. Of course what we tried to do is to identify each particular master-servant relationship and their differences.
Audience member: I'm Irish and very very old, and in my youth in most families servants were very much part of the family. There was a great deal of love. The other thing is, Lopakhin loves Ranevskaya.
TN: This is a reference to how Lopakhin, born of a peasant family, regards Ranevskaya. There are as many sub-texts for this relationship as there are productions. Such subtextual questions abound in Chekhov, for example: what is the story of Varya? She was adopted before Anya was born. Why? Why would Ranevskaya, married to a man who drinks too much, adopt a child before she has had any of her own? Because she thinks she can't have children? Or is there a story behind the story? Would a Russian audience immediately say, “I understand what that means: Varya must be Ranevskaya's illegitimate child or her alcoholic husband's illegitimate child”? So you can endlessly argue about these off-stage things. But there does seem to be very strong validity in the subtextual relationship between Lopakhin and Ranevskaya. Very early on in the play, Lopakhin talks about the moment when he first came to the Gaev house (rather like Pip in Great Expectations), a peasant boy who goes up to the big house and is absolutely transfixed by the young woman of the household. How beautiful she was, how she bathed his forehead and spoke to him affectionately. The incident becomes overwhelmingly important to him. He then says a little later, “I love you, I love you like flesh and blood. No, more than flesh and blood.” In some incoherent way, he seems to be saying, “I've only lived for your return”. Ranevskaya responds, “Yes, that's really touching, but will you marry Varya?” And he appears to accede, “Well yes, anything to please you.” But his attachment to Ranevskaya is so deeply rooted. All of the people in the play are, in one way or another, locked up in their own past. It's no accident that Act One takes place in the room they call the nursery. Chekhov is saying that Gaev and Ranevskaya in particular are still, at least in their own minds, the privileged children of this beautiful household. When Mama walked in her beautiful white dress through the cherry orchard, and the toys were new and they as children were innocent; none of it was tainted. The play says, in one way or another, how very, very hard it is for all of us to leave the nursery, wherever our nursery is located. How very hard it is to go from the nursery to the harsher realities of the world beyond. What I tried to do at the end of the production was to show Ranevskaya, thinking she'll take the music box with her, but instead opening it once more because the childlike sound is what this nursery still means to her and has always meant to her. She needs that accompaniment in order to leave the nursery, never to return. Somehow in her mind that music will always be playing in her nursery. Somebody reviewed that moment as a “ghastly bit of sentimentality”, but if it is, then it's Ranevskaya's understandable sentimentality and not Chekhov's, and hopefully not mine.
Audience member (Ben Okri): It strikes me from your various productions that there is a discernible principle that emerges from your work. I want to ask you, first of all, for you as a director, do you pursue the principle of truth as much as possible as you find it within a text, or do you find it necessary to bring a redeeming or almost, if you like, point of radiance? I sense that quality in your work even when you are dealing with tragedy so that you come out hit and hurt by your productions but also a touch uplifted.
TN: Well, Ben, I know you always find a point of radiance in your work. I was educated at the feet of Dr FR Leavis – literally at the feet, as we all had to sit on coconut matting and he had the only chair in the room – but Leavis thought of the theatre as a relatively frivolous place. Not that dramatists were frivolous, in his Pantheon some of the greatest works are works of the theatre. But Leavis needed to identify “moral” purpose in a work. That's not the same as requiring preachy moralising, but the presence of some sort of irreduceable moral centre. And so his take on the great novelists and the great dramatists all comes down to their seriousness about society, now and in the future. Once you have been so educated (and of course once you had sat at the feet of Leavis you became a Leavisite, a disciple) his approach becomes very hard to forget. Therefore I confess that I do conduct myself, and my rehearsals, according to humanist principles which lead me to uncover every possible imaginable behavioural detail that makes a writer's humanist observation more truthful and recognisable; and therefore that I also search for some “moral” core that involves the idea of optimism.
JB: I can't think of a better word on which to end.