The premise of Anton Chekhov’s iconic play, The Cherry Orchard is essentially a lugubrious one: a family, steeped in debt, is bereaved of its cherished cherry orchard and estate. The play closes with the sound of the tearing down of their orchard, one that we are invited during the course of the play to imagine as a remarkable garden. ‘If there is anything at all interesting about our entire province, anything in the least way remarkable, it would have to be this cherry orchard of ours’, (quoted from Maria Amadei Ashot’s translation) we hear Ranevsky, the aristocratic owner of the estate say when the idea of auctioning the garden is proposed. So it is only natural that we are invited to empathise with the dispossessed in the play.
However, each time we are drawn closer to the predicament of the family that is losing everything, Chekhov tears you away. This he does by distracting you soon after a character begins to open up about his or her life or by cracking the most irreverent joke deliberately timed as the reply to a heavy-hearted confession. The Cherry Orchard , therefore, has a fidgety quality to it with the element of ridicule punctuating the tragic throughout the narrative. This technique takes the play beyond the confines of a tragedy or a comedy and successfully swathes it in a farce.
Venkatesh Prasad’s Kannada version, Cherry Thota , staged by The Bangalore Theatre Company at Ranga Shankara recently, executed this Chekhovian tactic sincerely. Prasad’s play succeeds in making you delightfully restless. Raneyvsky comes back to the estate from Paris after a long time and brings with her an enormous debt. However, there is a strange callousness with which she and her family approache this debt. Prasad and his team retain almost everything from the original. The setting of the play, for example, is certainly not universal. Chekhov locates his protagonists in 19 century Russia, and Prasad does not alter this. Though at first the Russian names of the characters seem a bit out of place, the actors contextualise the play well and soon names such as Lopahir, Dunyasha and Anya lose their unfamiliar ring. Like its original, the play is divided into four acts and follows the sequence of events faithfully. The costumes too are from an era we can barely relate to. In a sense, if not for the fact that the actors speak in Kannada, there is hardly anything that gives Cherry Thota a local flavour. In spite of this, themes of loss, of memory and change, of ‘development’ etc. have a resounding relevance with us. And the credit for this would have to go to the actors. Each actor in the Company played their role perfectly. They straddled both the deeply emotional and the superficially amusing aspects of the play with absolute ease. The set design was simple and one wished that there was more thought given to physically constructing a beautiful cherry orchard. What the team had put in place instead was a giant golden frame which, one could argue, worked in building the audience’s imagination of the orchard. It could have been so much more though.
Cherry Thota’s strength undoubtedly is in its ability to invite you to ruminate about what the garden really stands for. We are repeatedly told it is remarkable but at the same time, we are also informed that the family has forgotten the recipe to make the jams and the pickles. The orchard is a symbol of the glorious past; it is a memory. Where is the place for such a symbol in a world that is focussed on realising its own theories of progress and development, the play asks us.
Finally and more importantly, Prasad shows us that the orchard is a symbol of status; and its cutting down, therefore, is symbolic of the tearing down of the old elite order. While in the original, towards the end of the play, Firs, the loyal servant of the family, abandoned, dies on the sofa, in Prasad’s version, he is seen addressing Lopahir as his new master. This ending is significant and in keeping with the farcical tone of the play. A dedicated servant, Firs is seen throughout serving and caring for the family. It is ironic and thematically fitting therefore when he accepts a new master with such ease. This is Bangalore Theatre Company’s own addition and it firmly remains within the confines of a farce and does not stray into the tragic.
