SparkNotes: The Cherry Orchard: Context The Cherry Orchard Table of Contents Plot Overview Anton Pavlevich Chekhov was born on January 17th, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia. His father Pavel was a shopkeeper the town, which was small, provincial, and on the Sea of Azov in the south of Russia, and his grandfather was Egor Chekhov, a serf. Serfs were the legal property of the landowners who owned the property on which they resided; it was thus a form of slavery. In 1841, Egor bought freedom for himself and his family at the price of 875 rubles. Russia had been changing ever since the early 18th century, when Tsar Peter the Great carried out a series of reforms with the intent of modernizing Russia in Western Europe's image. European styles in fashion and art were imported, the Western canon was widely read among the nobility, and French was adopted as the language of cultured discourse. A large government bureaucracy was created; the achievement of rank became an obsession of Russian life.

During Chekhov's childhood, in the time of Tsar Alexander II, a second wave of reforms was underway, reforms that further liberalized the country and its economy. The most important of these was the Emancipation Declaration of 1861, which freed the serfs from bondage. These reforms caused great controversy, as they introduced what was, in effect, the beginning of a free-market economy, undermining the power of the nobility, and sometimes even impoverishing them. The situation displayed in The Cherry Orchard, of a wealthy landowning family forced to sell their estate in order to pay their debts, was thus a familiar one in the Russian society of Chekhov's day. Chekhov himself had a relatively quiet childhood. He attended the local Russian grammar school, worked in his father's store and occasionally wrote small pieces for the amusement of his family. Taganrog was not a typical provincial town; it was a multicultural port, with Italians, Greeks, and Turks residing in the wealthier sections of town and Russians such as the Chekhovs living in comparatively poor suburbs. It had a theater, which the young Chekhov would often visit.

When Chekhov was sixteen, Pavel's store failed, and the entire family had to move to Moscow—the entire family, that is, except for Anton. A merchant (and friend of the family) had helped the Chekhovs with a loan, but insisted on keeping Anton with him in the house as a kind of collateral. As soon as he could, he left Taganrog in order to pursue medical studies in Moscow in 1879 at the age of 19. That year, Chekhov began to write comic stories in order to pay his medical school tuition. By the time he was twenty, he was employed by The Spectator magazine as their regular humorist. Over ninety percent of Chekhov's published work appeared in magazines before he was twenty-eight, and, by this age, he had already established himself as a premier writer of short stories. As he developed as a writer, his stories began to take on deeper and more profound themes, as he moved away from his comic roots. To this day, Chekhov's literary reputation primarily rests with his short stories, and Chekhov's early plays, written primarily in his early 20s, are not well-remembered.

It was only in 1896 that he began to turn his attention back to drama; in the eight remaining years before his death, he managed to complete four plays: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. The first performance of The Seagull was nearly laughed off the stage; it was criticized as dull, unimaginative, and lacking any sort of dramatic tension (a critical undercurrent that has survived in Russia to this day). Only gradually did Chekhov's new form of drama, emphasizing characterization, detail and symbolism instead of plot development and incident, gain acceptance. Chekhov was the in-house playwright for the Moscow Arts Theatre, which had been founded by his friend Vladimir Nemirovich-Davchenko. During this time, he fell in love with one of the Theatre's leading actresses, Olga Knipper, and would marry her in 1901. Chekhov wrote his last two plays after he had been diagnosed, in 1898, with tuberculosis.

The Cherry Orchard itself was written over a period of more than two years, from early 1901 to late 1903, during which Chekhov was often in doctor-imposed exile from his wife and friends in Moscow, on the Mediterranean island of Yalta, in order to spare his ailing lungs. The germination of The Cherry Orchard probably came from numerous and diverse sources, over a longer period of time than that for any of Chekhov's other works. Chekhov had known cherry trees from his childhood days in Taganrog, before they were all cleared as a result of Alexander's liberal economic policies which encouraged development of the Russian hinterland. Also, Chekhov had himself planted a cherry orchard on an estate in Melikhovo that he purchased in 1892; he lost the estate a short while later, and the new owner cut down the cherry trees. Much of the intellectual discussion in The Cherry Orchard is distinctly influenced by Chekhov's wide reading in literature, philosophy, and the natural sciences, especially Darwin's Origin of the Species (first published only some forty years earlier) and Marxist and socialist philosophy (though Chekhov himself was not himself a member of any revolutionary movements).

Chekhov had initially intended his last play to be a comedy, a vaudeville in fact, and though he may have given up that last idea he still subtitles his play A Comedy in Four Acts. Unfortunately for Chekhov, the most common reaction to the play was typified by his wife: "by the fourth act I burst out sobbing". Stanislavsky, the play's director, decided to interpret the play as a drama, against Chekhov's wishes. The debate over whether the play is in fact a comedy or a drama still goes on to this day. The initial reception of the play ranged from the indifference of Maxim Gorky, who thought the play's story to be completely insignificant, to the loathing of Ivan Bunin, who attacked the play for being unrealistic in its depiction of both the central aristocratic family and the outrageously oversized cherry orchard. But it was also praised as one of Chekhov's best works, and possibly his best play. The Russian Symbolist poets saw the play as a narrative poem mourning the loss of beauty in the world, and thus saw Chekhov as a kindred spirit.

The Bolsheviks would interpret the play as a harbinger of the 1917 revolution, because of Trofimov's speeches (many of which were censored by the Tsarist regime for the 1904 perfomance). Many noticed and applauded its new formal innovations in terms of the use of the empty stage, lost dialogue and its mixing of comic and tragic elements. But many saw the play as undeniably tragic, focusing on Ranevsky's downfall as the important element of the story. Chekhov's critical reception outside of Russia was mixed, partly due to translation problems and the play's unique "Russian-ness", which Chekhov himself foresaw as being impossible for any foreign audience to overcome. Many foreign readers and viewers faulted the play for being unheroic, negative, and devoid of plot. But no less a figure than George Bernard Shaw said that "hearing Chekhov's plays make me want to tear up my own", and Chekhov's drama has gained increasing acceptance and praise over the course of the last century.

Chekhov managed to attend The Cherry Orchard's opening night gala at the Moscow Arts Theatre on January 17th, 1904, his forty-fourth birthday. The night was also intended to celebrate his 25th year in literature; but the sight of the ill, dying Chekhov, now in the last stages of his disease, was not a cause for celebration. He remained in Moscow for the last few months of his life, finally succumbing to tuberculosis on July 1st of that same year, a few days after the The Cherry Orchard's first publication. More Help Chekhov Plays: The Seagull; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard (World Classics) Anton Chekhov: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama The Seagull; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard Please note there is a 2-4 week delivery period for this title. Free UK delivery on orders £25 or over Delivery & Returns (?) Once you have successfully made your exam-copy request, you will receive a confirmation email explaining that your request is awaiting approval.

On approval, you will either be sent the print copy of the book, or you will receive a further email containing the link to allow you to download your eBook. For more information, visit our exam-copy area . Please note that we currently support the following browsers: Internet Explorer 9, 10 and 11; Chrome (latest version, as it auto updates); Firefox (latest version, as it auto updates); and Safari (latest version, as it auto updates). Lorem About Chekhov Plays This volume includes The Seagull, a about the battle for power between a mother and her son which ends in tragedy; Uncle Vanya tells of two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere, and a flirtation that brings disaster; Three Sisters in which three siblings wrestle with their futures and The Cherry Orchard where the old must inevitably give way to the new. Haunting and elusive, these four great late masterpieces have found in Michael Frayn a translator who perfectly captures their delicate balance of the tragic and the absurd. The volume also contains four of Chekhov's early short 'vaudevilles' as well as a substantial introduction by Michael Frayn.

"The critical clamour for a Complete Chekhov in Michael Frayn's translation has borne fruit" (Sunday Times) Table of contents Chekhov: Four Plays; The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard in Plays Plays Plays at Strand Books Location: Section Shelves Quantity: Sorry, this item is currently unavailable. You can still add it to your wishlist below. We will notify you via email when it is back in stock. Please note that prices are subject to change. Product Description Includes The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Editorial Reviews Chekhov left a legacy of four major dramas as well as hundreds of short comic sketches and stories. Strongly influenced by the Symbolist movement, Chekhov drew upon his personal experiences in depicting the lives of the Russian landed gentry. The period 1996-2004 marks the centennial of the premieres of his best-known plays and brings a renewed appreciation of his place in modern drama. The translations of The Three Sisters, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard by Rocamora (theater, Tisch Sch.

of the Arts, NYU) remain faithful to the period flavor of the original while being fresh and fluid for modern American actors and audiences. Rocamora also provides a lengthy biographical sketch of Chekhov, which is useful for an understanding of his works. A respected translator, dramaturge, actor, and playwright, Schmidt intends to re-create in American English vernacular the vitality and humor of Chekhov. In this, he succeeds admirably, particularly in some of the short comedies, such as The Proposal. Schmidt's translations seem the more contemporary of the two work under review, and he makes use of many common vulgarisms in the comedies?presumably bringing them closer to what Chekhov's audiences were familiar with. Both titles offer fine contemporary translations that are a pleasure to read. If your collection can support only one "complete Chekhov," go with Schmidt; otherwise, these two titles complement each other and can be recommended for all modern drama collections.?Howard E. Miller, St. Louis Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information.

The Four Major Plays: "Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters" AND Cherry Orchard" : Anton Pavlovich Chekhov : 9781566636261 Try AbeBooks Description More than a century since Chekhov's death, his artistic influence continues to be felt throughout literature and the theater, where many refer to him as the progenitor of modern drama. Why is it that as frequently as Chekhov's work is performed in the modern English-speaking theater, it is so often stuck in interpretations that are historically accurate but bereft of contemporary resonance and genuine passion? Why does his prose often sound stilted, precious, forced, and humorless? To anyone who has read him in the Russian, this is the furthest from a description of his language that anyone could imagine. In Russian, Chekhov is blunt, muscular, even coarse, simultaneously funny and sad because he is so uncomplicated. In these fresh, vibrant new translations of Chekhov's four greatest plays_Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and Cherry Orchard_the brilliant theatrical translator Curt Columbus recaptures the master's open-ended simplicity, at once colloquial and accurate.

He endows these timeless dramas with dialogue that is faithful to the Russian original but dazzlingly attuned to contemporary audiences. Here is Chekhov for the twenty-first century: a master playwright in the hands of a master translator. show more Product details 139.7 x 213.36 x 25.4mm | 362.87g Publication date Chekhov: The Four Major Plays: Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard: Anton Chekhov, Curt Columbus: 9781566636261: Books - Amazon.ca 5.0 out of 5 stars good shape Aug. 18 2013 By Steve - Published on Amazon.com Format: Paperback Verified Purchase Great shape...like the edition. It seems like new..Good introduction before you get into the plays. Keep up the good work Thanks. 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Plays by the good doctor Anton Chekhov will live forever in the theatre of the human soul Aug. 25 2008 By C. M Mills - Published on Amazon.com Format: Paperback Dr.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was the first major Russian writer who was not an aristocrat. His grandfather had been a serf. Chekhov was a brilliant genius of classic short stories and plays. In this Modern Library edition his four most famous plays are translated into English. Those plays are: 1. The Seagull: This 1896 play won fame for Chekhov following its production at the Moscow Art Theatre. The work deals with the love of the fledgling playwright Trepilov in love with Nina who dreams of becoming a great actress. Nina falls in love with the famous playwright Trigorin running away with him. In despair, Trepilov plays a dead seagull which he has shot down at the feet of Nina. Two years later, Nina returns to the estate deserted by her quondom lover the scamp Trigorin. She declares that her life has been shot down just as the seagull was earlier brought down to death. Trigorin attempts suicide for the second time and is successful in this effort. The play is beautifully written and the theme of being busy with work is prominent.

It is a play about the hard work necessary by a playwright as well as dealing with a tragic love story. 2. Uncle Vanya-This 1899 play deals with the kindly Uncle Vanya who has managed the estate of professor Serebryakov for many years. Vanya comes to realize that the lazy professor is an academic fraud. Vanya falls in love with the professor's lovely second wife Elena Andreyevna. She rejects him as a lover. The inept Vanya then attempts to kill the professor with a gun but fails. The professor forgives him though he agrees not to sell the estate which Vanya feared would occur. Life returns to normal. 3. The Three Sisters-The play deals with the boring lives of three sisters from Moscow: Olga, Masha and Irina who live in a provincial city of 100,000. The three women dream of returning to Moscow; fall in love with various officers stationed in the town but at the end of Act IV remain in their dull lives. The play deals with ordinary day to day existence. The lives of the characters are jejune as they yearn to be free of everyday responsibilities.

They remind this reviewer of Thoreau's famous line about people living lives of "quiet desperation." 4. The Cherry Orchard deals with the forced sale of a beautiful Cherry Orchard by an aristocratic family experiencing hard economic times. The plangent sound of an ax cutting down the cherry trees ends the play. All of these plays were written in four acts. Their major themes are the need for work even in a world where such effort might seem futile. Chekhov's focus is on families of the lower aristocracy and middle class. He wrote on the eve of Russian revolution as the old way of life was about to pass from the scene forever. 7 of 7 people found the following review helpful Project MUSE - The Cherry Orchard, and: Uncle Vanya, and: Three Sisters, and: The Seagull (review) The Cherry Orchard. By Anton Chekhov. Directed by Jonathan Miller Sheffield Theatres, Crucible, Sheffield. 03 Uncle Vanya. By Anton Chekhov. Directed by Rachel Kavanaugh. Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham. 04 Three Sisters. By Anton Chekhov. Directed by Declan Donnellan. Cheek by Jowl, Barbican, London. 17 The Seagull.

By Anton Chekhov. Directed by Trevor Nunn. Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. 08 06 2007. The British theatre's love affair with Chekhov continues ineluctably, with major productions of each of the four "great" plays appearing during the spring alone of 2007 (including the third Seagull in less than a year). Cheek by Jowl even performed Three Sisters in Russian. Initially staged as part of the 2005 Chekhov International Theatre Festival in Moscow, it is the third production by the Russian ensemble that director Declan Donnellan established in 2000. On a tour of Britain, the company presented Three Sisters in London together with Cymbeline, performed by an English cast; a program note averred the plays' mutual concern with sibling relationships. More convincing was the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC) pairing of Seagull with King Lear, both touring internationally before opening in the West End in late 2007.

Not only did the conjunction highlight a shared emphasis on fraught parent–child relationships, but, as directed by Trevor Nunn, the productions accentuated the element of self-conscious performance in both plays. Click for larger view Figure 1. Roger Hammond (Pishchik) and Joanna Lumley (Ranevskaya) in The Cherry Orchard. Photo: Catherine Ashmore. Two of these four Chekhov productions were by directors responsible for particularly celebrated stagings of Chekhov during the 1970s. Nunn had directed an uncompromisingly somber chamber production of Three Sisters for the RSC in 1978–79, and Jonathan Miller, director of the Sheffield Theatres' Cherry Orchard, had previously worked with Seagull (1973–74) and Three Sisters (1976), productions notable for renouncing the elegiac lyricism and romanticism long characteristic of British Chekhov. Although British productions continue to treat the characters more indulgently than Miller does, they have otherwise caught up with him in at least attenuating the sentimentality and affirming the comedy in the play, as this quartet demonstrated.

Only in the RSC's Seagull did the romanticism and tragic impulse dubiously reassert themselves. Miller's concern to preempt the opportunity for sentimentality was most evident in relation to Ranevskaya and, as a program note intimated, stemmed in part from a refusal to indulge the old order. Cast for her comic skill, which she demonstrated well enough, Joanna Lumley understated Ranevskaya's emotionalism. Unfortunately, Lumley's limited emotional range and depth, highlighted by comparison with Peter Eyre's performance as Gayev, deprived some scenes of real impact, notably the argument between Ranevskaya and Trofimov in act 3. Lopakhin did not become the central figure, as Chekhov may have wished, thus something of a vacuum appeared near the heart of the play—all the more ironic because of Lumley's "star" billing. Additionally, notwithstanding the political analysis informing the production, the representation of the larger sociohistorical context proved opaque.

As in Richard Eyre's two Cherry Orchards in Nottingham (1977) and for the BBC (1981), Lopakhin was a Scot, whose Presbyterian persona underlined the upper-class English accents and insouciance of Ranevskaya and Gayev. The production also cast the mysterious Passerby as Irish. However, if his nationality signified wider social malaise, this was undermined by the grotesque wig and makeup that may have masked the actor's doubling as the Stationmaster but which rendered the intruder merely pantomimic, providing no hint of his being a political radical escaping from exile. This obfuscation emerged despite the significance of the painted backdrop used for act 2: a large reproduction of Levitan's "Vladimirka"—an 1892 landscape depicting the famous road along which convicts marched to Siberia. The allusion was too abstruse and the painting looked merely like a period mood landscape; [End Page 129] moreover, it lacked the synecdochic elements—telegraph poles and distant town—that Chekhov specifies to evoke the world beyond the estate.

In failing to substantiate meaningfully that wider world and in underplaying Ranevskaya, the Crucible's Cherry Orchard did not realize satisfactorily the conflict between objective reality and subjective feelings that is fundamental to the drama. Click for larger view Figure 2. Flora Montgomery (Elena), John Hodgkinson (Astrov), and John Ramm (Vanya) in Uncle Vanya. Photo: Robert Day. Meanwhile, the production forsook the usual substitute for the foregrounding of that conflict by conspicuously eschewing atmospherics and theatricality. In this respect, Miller's production was most out of step with the others, and indeed with other Cherry Orchards, which with increasing alacrity exploit the play's vaudevillian elements. In act 3—an obvious occasion for burlesque and frivolity—Miller consigned the ballroom to the wings; there was not even any dancing onstage, and no sign of Sharlotta's cartwheels. The downplaying of the buffoonery contributed to some intriguing interpretations of scenes and characters, in particular the servant roles.

Debbie Chazen's stolid, corpulent Dunyasha exhibited no trembling and nerviness, and Hugh Sachs seemed remarkably phlegmatic as Yepikhodov, conspicuously toning down or omitting the instances of clumsiness. Meanwhile, in act 2, Sharlotta appeared without a shotgun and produced a surprisingly small cucumber. Ironically, despite spurning these opportunities for visual comedy, Miller actually interpolated lines into Pam Gems's translation of the play for laughs. The denial of The Cherry Orchard's theatrical, even Maeterlinckian elements reinforced the impression of naturalism—long a hallmark of Miller's productions—in this least naturalistic of Chekhov's plays. Characteristically, Donnellan also abjured lyricism with Three Sisters—his first Chekhov production—but, unlike Miller, he pointedly broke with naturalism—costumes alone specifying the turn of the twentieth-century. The only pictorial elements in the design were: in the first three acts, two narrow photographs hanging from the flies of a pristine, two-storeyed house with birches visible behind; and, in the final act, three photos of a wooded garden.

Otherwise Nick Ormerod's set comprised principally sixteen chairs and eight small square tables that, initially scattered randomly, were reassembled by the cast in different configurations for each act. In act 3, they created a confined bedroom, while in act 4, most were stacked stage left to signify the house. The successive rearrangements and the furniture's toy-like aspect within the black, cavernous Barbican stage suggested the sisters' progressive dislocation and the smallness of the characters' lives in the larger continuum that Vershinin in particular identifies. An actual doll's house reinforced these [End Page 130] points. First spotlighted downstage, the house was repositioned from act to act before being turned on its side for act 4. Click for larger view Figure 4. Jonathan Hyde (Dorn), Frances Barber (Arkadina), and Monica Dolan (Masha) in The Seagull. Photo: Manuel Harlan. The production's fluid staging facilitated some stylistic elements that, unremarkable in themselves, further breached the essentially naturalistic conventions of British Chekhov.

In familiar Cheek by Jowl fashion, the performance began with all the actors assembling onstage, the Prozorov siblings grouped downstage in a tight family portrait (anticipating the photographs taken later) and the others spread at large. Olga addressed her opening lines toward the audience. Although this choice eliminated Chekhov's counterpoint of the sisters downstage with the three officers grouped upstage, the device represented an interesting solution to the lines' problematically expository nature. Donnellan also reconceived Chekhov's layout of two adjoining rooms for the first two acts; instead of the dining room being upstage, in act 1, a long, narrow table ran downstage–upstage, bisecting the space. The private scenes between Tuzenbakh and Irina and between Andrey and Natasha, which occur in the drawing room while everyone else is at the table, played dynamically across and around the diners, a change of lighting signaling the separate worlds. These scenes were symptomatic of a tendency, typical of Donnellan's productions, to conduct conversations, even intimate ones, across a wide expanse and to have much circumambulation on the stage.

The injection of theatricality into the play was especially evident in the anticipation of the Shrovetide party in act 2. Fedotik and Rodé were present from the beginning of the act, occasionally engaging with others and playing the guitar and singing. A small stage, evidently for the mummers, had been constructed from some of the tables. Fedotik, Rodé, and Tuzenbakh, who arrived already tipsy, played and sang on it, and in turn Tuzenbakh and Vershinin jumped onto it to perform their "philosophizing." Meanwhile, the would-be revelers found masks and other party paraphernalia in a trunk. By the time Natasha pulled the plug on the proceedings, a mock funeral was being conducted for Tuzenbakh, who had collapsed on the floor. Although there were surprising oversights in aspects of characterization and motivation, the production offered some delightful insights and images. Drawing attention to their childless marriage, in act 3, Kulygin took the pillow Masha had thrown at him and pressed it against her stomach, nestling his head against the pillow as she recited "amo amas. . .

." In the first act, Andrey Merzlikin's Solyony often clung to the peripatetic Tuzenbakh, suggesting a curious combination of dependence on and protectiveness of him. Meanwhile, far from being the least colorful sister, Evgenia Dmitrieva's Olga was strikingly dynamic: she was girlishly vivacious in act 1, and then, dressed in Vershinin's military coat and cap, she arrived giggling and tipsy for the second-act party—her subsequent complaints of a headache seemingly a reproach to Irina's ill temper. Only after Natasha's dismissal of Anfisa did she take on the role of the stern schoolmistress with her sister-in-law. The Birmingham Rep's and RSC's productions also endeavored to enliven Chekhov's world, but both were conceived much more conventionally, as demonstrated by the detail of their designs. Ruari Murchison's set for Uncle Vanya included a large forest of birches—those perennial signifiers of Chekhov's Russia—always at least partially visible through windows in the series of dilapidated interiors downstage.

The concern to jolly up the play was evident in Bryony Lavery's specially commissioned translation: like Miller, Lavery cracks jokes that do not exist in the Russian while at the same [End Page 131] time missing laughs in Chekhov's lines. Particularly vivid in the production was the impression that life in the household had indeed been turned upside down since the arrival of the Professor and his wife. Almost everyone seemed on a short fuse and arguments flared up fiercely. Although leavened somewhat by playfulness between Vanya and Yelena, this tension resulted in acting of almost relentless, unmodulated vehemence. The straining obviously took its toll on the voice of John Ramm, playing Vanya. The stridency of the acting and commensurate heavy-handedness in characterization were doubtless exacerbated by the translation, whose staccato rhythms and occasionally awkward, convoluted turns-of-phrase created problems, particularly for John Hodgkinson as Astrov. The fairly loose translation sometimes betrays a woeful unawareness of Chekhov's dramaturgy; Lavery admits to abbreviating some lines, but she also misses Chekhov's terseness by embellishing and even repeating lines.

Meanwhile, her difficulties with tone are exemplified by the infelicitously bathetic rendition of the key refrain in Sonya's final speech: "We (will) get a bit of a rest." The use of direct address to the audience for soliloquies also proved symptomatic of the production's unease. No such uneasiness with style and tone marked the RSC's Seagull, a production that ultimately took refuge in some of the traditional, cherished hallmarks of British Chekhov. Certainly Nunn found much more comedy in Seagull than he had in Three Sisters, and on the whole, the characters were not sentimentalized. Gerald Kyd played Trigorin perhaps too benignly, given the writer's self-absorption and treatment of Nina, but there was little sympathy for Arkadina, played by Frances Barber, whose selfishness and unkindness were perhaps emphasized by Barber's playing Goneril in King Lear.

However, Christopher Oram's design and Nunn's mise-en-scène resorted to the elaborate, atmospheric detail and extraneous stage business from which Miller sought to rescue Chekhov, in the process drawing out the action to a full three hours and robbing the play of its sharp, ironic edge. The pairing with King Lear provided ten extras to play miscellaneous servants and estate workers in Seagull. Individually characterized, those servants sketched in relationships between one another as they watched Treplyov's play and (re)arranged furniture, props, carpets, and cushions during prolonged scene changes. The production added a particularly elaborate dumb show at the end of act 2: having spied Nina and Trigorin together, Konstantin mounted his outdoor stage and shot himself, observed by a distraught Masha; the household gathered, Arkadina fainted—all to the accompaniment of loud music. The acting added careful behavioral detail, most amusingly in Barber's Arkadina; her fulsome kisses of Dorn not only confirmed his reputation as a lady's man, but also implied that Arkadina had been one of his amours.

After vaunting her youthfulness, she needed the doctor's spectacles when she took over the reading of Maupassant, and she betrayed her meanness when, exchanging a collusive look with Shamrayev, she extinguished a candle. Notwithstanding such ironic and satirical moments as the behavioral and scenic texturing indicate, the acting in Seagull was generally prone to self-indulgence in a way that Cheek by Jowl's Three Sisters avoided. That self-indulgence seemed most evident and most damaging in Romola Garai's performance as Nina, which subsided into excessive emotionalism and effectively sabotaged the play. Ironically, Garai's strongest moment occurred in the presentation of Treplyov's play-within-the-play; otherwise, she betrayed her inexperience onstage with acting as crude and vulgar as we're told Nina's is. Mannered and histrionic, she overdid the girlish infatuation with Trigorin with gaping mouth, bulging eyes, and giggling, and in her final scene she grew almost relentlessly hysterical. Drawing out that scene to almost twenty minutes, Garai perversely suggested that Nina, despite her assertions to the contrary, is indeed destroyed like the symbolic seagull.

Reinforcing the apparent tragedy of her plight, the last part of the scene played out under an impressive downpour—a drenched Nina returning to the outdoor stage to re-enact Treplyov's play. Alas, this overwrought performance and its dubious contradiction of any note of optimism served to eclipse and unbalance the counterpoint with Treplyov's story and his realization that, while Nina has found her vocation, he has not. Ironically, advertisements abroad focused on Garai's performance as this Seagull's crowning glory. Although the RSC served up the traditional ingredients of British Chekhov with great skill, it is perhaps unfortunate that its Seagull so emphatically reasserted self-indulgent emotionalism and tragic romanticism. As Miller's Cherry Orchard and, more particularly, Donnellan's Three Sisters demonstrate, some contemporary productions do challenge the cardinal tenets of British Chekhov. However, that Stanislavskian recipe of poetic naturalism and fine acting, which can be traced back to the productions of Theodore Komisarjevsky and Michel Saint-Denis during the 1920s and 1930s, has proved remarkably resilient.

Stuart Young Plays: "Ivanov", "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", "The Cherry Orchard" Plays: "Ivanov", "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", "The Cherry Orchard" Anton Chekhov ISBN: 9780140447330 At a time when the Russian theatre was dominated by formulaic melodramas and farces, Chekhov created a new sort of drama that laid bare the everyday lives, loves and yearnings of ordinary people. This book includes an introduction that examines how Chekho More Information Below: Licensing Rights for this title are not available through Samuel French. Description Five masterful dramatic works from one of the world's best-loved playwrights, Anton Chekhov's "Plays" is translated with notes by Peter Carson, and an introduction by Richard Gilman in "Penguin Classics". At a time when the Russian theatre was dominated by formulaic melodramas and farces, Chekhov created a new sort of drama that laid bare the everyday lives, loves and yearnings of ordinary people.

"Ivanov" depicts a man stifled by inactivity and lost idealism, and "The Seagull" contrasts a young man's selfish romanticism with the stoicism of a woman cruelly abandoned by her lover. With 'the scenes from country life' of "Uncle Vanya", his first fully mature play, Chekhov developed his own unique dramatic world, neither tragedy nor comedy. In "Three Sisters" the Prozorov sisters endlessly dream of going to Moscow to escape the monotony of provincial life, while his comedy "The Cherry Orchard" portrays characters futilely clinging to the past as their land is sold from underneath them. Peter Carson's moving translations convey Chekhov's subtle blend of comedy, tragedy and psychological insight. In his introduction, Richard Gilman examines how Chekhov broke with theatrical conventions and discusses each play in detail. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born in Taganrog, a port on the sea of Azov. In 1879 he travelled to Moscow, where he entered the medical faculty of the university, graduating in 1884. During his university years, he supported his family by contributing humorous stories and sketches to magazines.

He published his first volume of stories, "Motley Tales", in 1886, and a year later his second volume "In the Twilight", for which he received the Pushkin Prize. Today his plays, including "Uncle Vanya", "The Seagull", and "The Cherry Orchard" are recognised as masterpieces the world over. If you enjoyed "Plays", you might like Chekhov's "The Shooting Party", also available in "Penguin Classics". Author taganrogcity.com | Chekhov Legacy Chekhov Legacy Theater Chekhov Legacy Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), was a Russian playwright and short-story writer. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia. In 1879, Chekhov moved to Moscow, where he studied medicine. He began his literary career writing short humorous stories and sketches for popular newspapers and comic sheets to help support his needy family. Chekhov graduated from medical school and became a doctor. His scientific background and his experiences as a country doctor contributed to the realism of his mature stories.

In 1890, Chekhov studied the Russian state prisons on Sakhalin Island in the Pacific Ocean. He described the terrible living conditions there in Sakhalin Island (1893-1894). While practicing as a doctor, he had his first full-lenght play, Ivanov (1887), produced, to a disappointing reception. He took up serious themes with such stories as "The Steppe" (1888) and "A Dreary Story" (1889); later stories include "The Black Monk" (1894) and "Peasants" (1897). He converted his second long play, The Wooden Demon (1889) into the masterpiece Uncle Vanya (1897). His play The Seagull (1896) was badly received until its successful revival in 1899 by K. Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre. He moved to the Crimea to nurse his eventually fatal tuberculosis, and there he wrote his great last plays, Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), for the Moscow Art Theatre.

Books with Anton Chekhov's autographs from the collection of Taganrog Memorial Chekhov Museum In 1901, Chekhov married Olga Knipper, an actress who played leading roles in several of his plays that were staged by the famous Moscow Art Theater. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler , Germany in 1904. Chekhov's plays, which take a tragicomic view of the staleness of provincial life and the passing of the Russian gentry, received international acclaim after their translation into English and other languages, and as a short-story writer he is still regarded as virtually unmatched. Most of his characters are decent and sensitive. They dream of improving their lives, but most fail, victims of their sense of helplessness and uselessness. Scholars believe Chekhov probably was criticizing the backwardness he saw in Russian social and political life under the czars. But he never preached at his readers or audiences, preferring to present highly individualized characters with specific problems. Chekhov's influence on the modern short story and the modern play was immense.

Among his innovations were his economical husbanding of narrative resources, his concentration on character as mood rather than action, his impressionistic adoption of particular points of view, his dispensing with traditional plot, and, as Charles May declared in an essay collected in A Chekhov Companion, his use of atmosphere as "an ambiguous mixture of both external details and psychic projection." In all these regards Chekhov had an immediate and direct impact on such Western writers as James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson; indirectly, most major authors of short stories in the twentieth century, including Katherine Anne Porter, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, and Raymond Carver, are in his debt. Among Western playwrights, George Bernard Shaw was the first to grasp Chekhov's intentions and techniques, and he modeled his own "Heartbreak House" (1919) on The Cherry Orchard. Yet it was not until the mid- 1920s that Chekhov caught on with English audiences, becoming one of the trio of major dramatists regularly performed in British playhouses, along with Ibsen and Shakespeare.

His influence on English playwrights other than Shaw, up to and including Harold Pinter, has been less direct, but no less powerful. In American drama the notion of "subtext" that Chekhov originated informs many of the works of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, and William Inge. Chekhov's methods also anticipate Bertolt Brecht's technique of "Vefreundungseffekt" ("estrangement") and Samuel Beckett's dramatic stasis and derealization. Contemporary Writers on Chekhov: There is never a time when I'm not reading or rereading a story or play by Chekhov. - Cristina Garcia In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. - William Faulkner I'm crazy about Chekhov. I never knew anyone that wasn't.

- Woody Allen Chekhov! Chekhov! Chekhov! - Tennessee Williams, asked to name his favorite authors Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me. - Eudora Welty If I have to choose between Chekhov and most hip-hop, I'll go with Chekhov. - Cornel West Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world. - Francine Prose, "Learning from Chekhov" Chekhov's stories are as wonderful (and necessary) now as when they first appeared. It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote - for few, if any, writers have ever done more - it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish. - Raymond Carver Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer.

- Ernest Hemingway Who better to learn from than Chekhov, who is here plainly in front of us to teach, as we can be plainly in front of him to learn. - Romulus Linney, Story Quarterly, 37, 2001 Anton Chekhov, 1897

Question: Who wrote the plays "The Cherry Orchard", "Three Sisters", "The Seagull" and "Uncle Vanya"?
Answer: Anton Chekhov