Cherry Orchard on the Taganka stage

Can you sit through a four-act play lasting six hours, even if broken up by three intermissions to give you a breather? Not sure? Neither am I. The only precedent, as far as I can remember, was at Southwest, a theater which staged all of Sukhovo-Kobylin's three plays on a single night. Really, it is not easy psychologically to sit that long. The audience did, watching a drama of passion, pain and tears unfolding onstage for six straight hours. It must have taken a genius of modern stagecraft to accomplish this feat...

Now we have entered the 21st century, but we still feel like we are in the 20th century in which so much happened to our parents, grandparents, and folks further down the family tree... In his own cherry orchard drama, Eimuntas Nekrosius, a Lithuanian-born director, plunged us into an abyss of horrors by opening our eyes on how little the start of last century differed from the beginning of this one, and how much in common we share with "them". The implication was that "their" disasters could befall us, with the complicity and connivance of "their" new reincarnations living among us. An avant-gardist by definition, Nekrosius has directed all of Chekhov's plays, of which The Cherry Orchard is his latest production (put on jointly by the Stanislavsky Fund and the Lithuanian Meno Fortas theater). Left one-on-one with the Chekhovian text with its complex dialogue, which is ostensibly derisory and, at times, slow-paced and paradoxical (you may get the impression that the characters don't hear one another and that everybody speaks about what interests them), and with the typically Chekhovian twists of the plot, the actors seem to have found themselves in the blinding glare of direct penetrating sunbeams bringing out every single one of their blemishes. What you see on stage, therefore, is an amazing cast playing freaks, cranks and utterly broken and emotionally drained characters.

The self-admiring Ranevskaya, in love with her vices, her afflictions and, of course, her orchard, is played by Liudmila Maksakova. All actors who ever happen to be in The Cherry Orchard will, unsurprisingly, be in competition with their great predecessors. Even if we leave out the distant past, we have seen, much more recently, such illustrious names as Demidova and Neyelova as Ranevskaya... Maksakova is up to the challenge; she's fascinatingly pretty. She knows this, and makes no effort to focus on anything but her own complexes.

The jerk and bootlicker Yasha (Anton Kukushkin) is the only match to Ranevskaya, with his neverending cant, "Paris, oh Paris...". He is loudmouthed and assertive like a tank in fighting to reach this goal. And yet, he is a long way from Lopakhin (Yevgeny Mironov).

The refined Chekhov himself and the early critics of his play guessed right that erratic capitalism was ruthless and inhumane, and compels everybody who wants to be a capitalist, whether he was born decent or otherwise (according to Chekhov's own casual remark, Lopakhin was a decent man), to play by rules that leave no room for mercy. The "decent Lopakhin" can, if asked to, help you survive by giving you money or a job so you can survive. But hardly more than that. He will not hesitate to do a wild, gleeful dance to show you how wonderful he feels after closing a profitable deal. He is a guy you will certainly like, a future gangster with the makings of a tycoon, an ugly symbol of the new life in Russia.

Or another symbol, Petya Trofimov (Igor Gordin), an uneducated, lazy, untidy and shaggy speaker. He doesn't love anyone either, not even the sunshine girl Anya, the only harmless creature in the bunch. Anya (Iuliya Marchenko) is a sweet maiden following her darling to plant new orchards. It's a pity her darling is so clumsy with the spade. And then there is the frantic Varya (Inga Strelkova-Oboldina). All the characters are sick at heart, unhappy, and doomed in this play. You won't see secondary characters here. There is the smashing Aleksei Petrenko (as Firs), clever, witty Charlotte (Irina Apeksimova)...

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