LANGUAGE AS NOSTALGIA

After many years, a group of relatives come together in their now-aging – and mortgaged – home. Deep down, they all know that this is their last chance to feel the sense of familiarity that unites them, but also to say goodbye to everything that seems already to belong to the past even as they are experiencing it.

Chekhov’s last play, written just a few months before his death, speaks with painful insouciance about a carefree present that is suffocatingly squashed between a rose-tinted past and a tragically uncertain future. The owners of the cherry orchard, drowning in debt and delusion, refuse to accept that their estate is lost and that the dramatically changing world has passed them by. Like all the play’s characters, more or less, they choose to cling to the light-heartedness of an eternal childhood, stubbornly postponing their adulthood.

The relationship of human beings with loss, with the relentless passage of time, and their inability to perceive reality in the round are the central themes of this hilarious and at the same time heartbreaking tragicomedy, over which terror – of the abyss and the infinite – constantly looms.

Chekhov’s apparently realistic speech and – by extension – world is essentially a complex, almost maximalist verbal and aural universe where banal everyday conversations, profound reflections, secret thoughts, feverish inner monologues, poems and songs, incomprehensible mutterings, and reassuringly familiar but menacingly alien sounds of the natural environment coexist in enviable harmony.

Using Chrysa Prokopaki’s superb translation and setting the action entirely in the drawing room and conservatory of a Russian dacha, Ektoras Lygizos’s adaptation treats Chekhov’s swan song as an ensemble piece. In a peculiar kind of “musical realism” – where the score is the text and the musical instruments human voices – the 11 cast members bring to life a group of people who, through their words and actions, fight to exorcise the silence and the emptiness that threaten at every moment to annihilate them.

This is the third time that The Cherry Orchard has been performed on the Main Stage of the National Theatre, 41 years after the production directed by Giorgos Michailidis and 58 years after that of Takis Mouzenidis.