by Elliot Huxtable
A question that’s been asked of me a lot recently is “you’re a Shakespeare Festival, why are you doing Chekhov?”
I have two answers for this - one flippant, and one more serious. The serious answer is that the Royal Shakespeare Company also produces a wide variety of non-Shakespearean plays, as does Shakespeare’s Globe and plenty of other ostensibly Shakespearean companies. This does not mean that we’re moving away from Shakespeare - furthest from it. We are merely doing the work of other writers to supplement our work on the Bard. It’s important, as a company, to situate Shakespeare as the originator of much of theatrical tradition, and the best way to do that is to offer other, classical writings.
The other, more flippant response, is that as Chekov died over 70 years ago, we don’t have to pay anyone any rights.
The British relationship with Chekhov is an interesting one - when Chekhov was first performed in this country just over a hundred years ago, and for about sixty years afterwards, the translations were verbatim, and straight-laced. Naturally, as with any verbatim translation, the subtlety and humour of plays such as The Seagull or The Cherry Orchard was completely lost (many of the aphorisms and phrases having no direct English version, and so come across as dry, incomprehensible nonsense).
This only changed after the fall of Soviet Russia, when their theatre practitioners came over and started to watch our dry, no-nonsense productions and responded with an astonished “where are the jokes?”.
And so that kick-started a revolution in Chekhovian translations that really centre on, and bring out, the comedic elements of the scripts. Despite the tragic plot of The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov described it as his “comic masterpiece”. This humour comes from the language, from the ironic dark comedy in what the characters say, how they react to their often woeful situations.
Which brings us to our production of the Cherry Orchard (Aphra Studio Theatre, 10th-12th April, tickets available here) where we are trying to pull as much comedy out of Charlotte Groombridge’s excellent version of the script as we can - the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. By emphasising the humour, the sadness, the tragedy of not just the very end, but the entire situation these characters find themselves in, becomes more impactful.
Only the other evening we rehearsed the whole of Act III for the first time, and the tonal discord of brilliant humour followed by utter despair makes the gut punches that much more effective - and I found myself laughing and crying within minutes of one another. Something not to miss!
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