by STEPHEN
HEATLEY
Director
Life is what happens
when you are busy making other plans.
- John Lennon
"Really, in life
people are not every minute shooting each other,
hanging themselves, and making declarations of
love. And they
are not saying clever things every minute. For
the most part, they
eat, drink, hang about, and talk nonsense; and
this must be seen
on the stage. A play must be written in which people
can come,
do, dine, talk about the weather, and play cards,
not because that's
the way the author wants it, but because that's
the way it happens
in real life." -Anton Chekhov Apparently, Anton Chekhov and Konstantin Stanislavsky,
the
famous Russian director and founder of the Moscow
Art Theatre,
could never agree on the tone of Chekhov's plays
when they were
first produced. Chekhov vowed that he had written
delightful
comedies; Stanislavsky presented them as serious
dramas.
My first exposure to this playwright, apart from
my performance
in The Marriage
Proposal in my first year of university,
which is
truly worth forgetting, and this debate, was studying
The Three
Sisters in a theatre history class. My first reading
of the play left
me entirely baffled. It just seemed like a lot
of non-sequiturs
strung together; sound and fury, signifying nothing
as far as this
second year student was concerned. My professor
was an inspiring
woman who found delight in almost everything dramatic.
We
were walking together soon after I had read this
conundrum. "
I read that Three
Sisters play," I ventured,
expecting, for some
reason, for her to commiserate with me. "Isn't
it delightful?!" she
chirped. "It's so funny." I was even
more baffled. She thought this
mêlée about three miserable women
moaning on about going to
Moscow and how unhappy they were and crying at
the drop of a
hat to be funny? I was willing to entertain the
idea because I
knew how smart she was but I certainly didn't get
it on my own.
That same year I saw a production of The
Three Sisters in Toronto -
not very funny. We worked on the last act of The
Cherry
Orchard that year in an acting class - not
very funny. I was in a
production of The
Sea Gull in my graduating year
- not very
funny. It wasn't until I had the good fortune to
see The Three
Sisters at the Stratford Festival in 1976,
starring Maggie Smith,
Marti Maraden and Martha Henry and directed by
the late, great
John Hirsch that I finally got it. The play lasted
three and a half
hours. We were transported. We hoped their hopes.
We revelled in
their dreams. We cheered for them to get to Moscow.
We lived
their passions. We laughed with them and we cried
with them and
when act four was finished I was more than willing
to come back
for act five and act six, it was that exhilarating.
On that evening,
I fell in love with the idea of directing one of
Chekhov's plays
myself. Here we are, 28 years later, and I finally
have the
opportunity for which I am truly grateful.
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The
object lesson of the Stratford production was that
these people are funny because life is full of
ironies and we humans are replete with foibles.
We do things that are funny without even trying.
We can't help ourselves. I recall my own experience
of being dumped on a hot day in summer by what
was, of course, the great love of my life. Amidst
my tears and anguish, sweat pouring down my face,
seeking solace with a dear friend, I blurted out, "Oh,
it's so uncomfortable to lose a lover on a hot
day!" There was a pause and then we both fell
about laughing. There is no denying how tender
I was, emotionally, but somehow in that moment
I also knew that I was ridiculous. So did my friend,
who has never let me forget it. Puck said it best
in A Midsummer
Night's Dream; "O, what fools these
mortals be."
This
is the 100th anniversary year of the first production
of The Cherry
Orchard. Many people feel that this play
presaged the end of Czarist Russia. Perhaps.
But to me, its importance today is that it still
speaks
of human experience. It has resonance because
it holds universal truths, not because of its
place
in history. I am sympathetic to the plight of
Lyubov and Gayev as they struggle to reconcile
their memories
and their family history with their financial
difficulties around the cherry orchard and their
ancestral home.
My ageing parents still live in the house that
my sister and I were raised in. Although the
old crabapple tree is gone (the crabapples were
wormy
anyway), the sense of our family's culture still
lives there - the rooms, the clutter, the memories,
our history. I have no idea what it will be like
to give that up when the time comes. This is
the important stuff of The
Cherry Orchard. It is a play about our
resistance to change, about holding on to some
thing or an
idea even when we know it doesn't make sense
any more, about the folly of living and the joy
we
find in simple things. At the time of this writing,
we have not even begun rehearsals, but these
are the things that are guiding me in our attempt
to
uncover the delight in The
Cherry Orchard. I dedicate my work in
it to the woman who first taught me that it was
funny;
Janet Dolman. She left us too soon but I hope
she would find this production to her liking.
Let everything on the
stage be just as complex and at the same time as
simple as in life. People dine, merely dine, but
at that moment their happiness is being made or
their life is being smashed.
Anton Chekhov |
