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Reinhabiting ‘The Cherry Orchard’: Class and History in Performing Chekhov

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

John Tulloch ,
Tom Burvill  and
Andrew Hood
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Abstract

Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is clearly ‘about’ the end of one social order – about time changing and time static. Yet different interpretive communities – academics in journal articles and students in their classrooms, newspaper reviewers, theatre writers like Trevor Griffiths and David Mamet, and theatre directors like Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre – ‘read’ Chekhov's representation of history and class change in different ways. The authors of this study have been exploring these different reading formations in a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’. Here – grounding their work in industry ‘readings’ via production study and interviews – they focus on production and performance of The Cherry Orchard, contrasting the Richard Eyre/Trevor Griffiths production of 1977 (reproduced in 1981 for BBC TV) with Adrian Noble's production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, in 1995. In particular, they discuss the writing, directing, acting, and staging of Chekhov's ‘modernity’ in these productions, suggesting that whereas Noble referenced and yet simultaneously occluded class in his rehearsal style and staging, Griffiths and Eyre worked for a production which not only embodied the intra-class mobility of the Thatcher era in 1981, but also the ‘then’ of Chekhov's own particular engagement with modernity and environment. John Tulloch, Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, is author of Chekhov: a Structuralist Study. Tom Burvill is Associate Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, where Andrew Hood is a PhD student working on reception cultures.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 13 , Issue 52 , November 1997 , pp. 318 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

Notes and References

1. ‘Adrian Noble talks with Peter Holland’, In Conversation: Explorations on the Stratford Season, 1995–96, RSC, 24 January 1996. All other quotations from Noble are from this interview, except where referenced.

2. Griffiths, Trevor, trans., The Cherry Orchard, in a New English Version (London: Pluto, 1981), p. vGoogle Scholar.

3. Interview with John Tulloch, July 1993.

4. Tulloch, J. and Burvill, T., ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’, Australian Research Council Large Grant, 1993–1996Google Scholar. Currently this is being written up for a book.

5. Mamet, David, quoted in The Cherry Orchard programme, New Theatre, 9 11–21 12 1996Google Scholar.

6. Mary-Anne Gifford, ‘Director's Note’, New Theatre programme.

7. See Seymour, Anna, ‘Culture and Political Change: British Radical Theatre in Recent History’, Theatre International Research, V, No. 21 (1996), p. 11Google Scholar.

8. Trevor Griffiths, interviewed by John Tulloch, July 1993.

9. All interviews with actors and personnel involved with the Eyre, Richard/Griffiths, Trevor productions of The Cherry Orchard in 1977 (Nottingham Playhouse)Google Scholar and 1981 (BBC Television) were conducted by John Tulloch and/ or Tom Burvill in 1993–94.

10. Garner, Stanton B. Jr, ‘History in the Year Two: Trevor Griffiths's Danton’, New Theatre Quarterly, XI, No. 44 (1995), p. 335Google Scholar.

11. Richard Eyre, interviewed by John Tulloch, July 1993.

12. It is important to emphasize that, in other respects, Trevor Griffiths was very happy with Bill Patterson's performance.

13. Griffiths, Trevor, quoted in Christy, Desmond, ‘Back to the Barricades’, The Guardian, 28 04 1986Google Scholar.

14. See Poole, Mike and Wyver, John, Powerplays: Trevor Griffiths in Television (London: BFI, 1984), p. 13–15Google Scholar.

15. J. Tulloch, T. Burvill, and A. Hood, ‘Receptions and Appropriations: The Cherry Orchard in Production and Criticism’, in D. Clayton, ed., Chekhov Then and Now: the Reception of Chekhov in World Culture (Ottawa: Peter Lang, forthcoming), p. 63–75.

16. Trevor Griffiths, lecturing at David Edgar's MA course in playwriting, University of Birmingham, 1990.

17. Trevor Griffiths, interviewed by John Tulloch, July 1993.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Interview with Peter Holland, January 1996.

21. Ibid.

22. Mulryne, Ronnie and Shewring, Margaret, Making Space for Theatre: British Architecture and Theatre since 1958 (Stratford: Mulryne and Shewring, 1995), p. 168Google Scholar.

23. Interview with John Tulloch, January 1996.

24. Rod Dungate at the Swan, RSC, July 1995.