The Cherry Orchard

In this day and age, when, on the one hand, in a more or less articulate and authentic tone of voice we call unto change – social, political, ideological, personal – awkwardly, we also fear it, because… We risk losing many of the comforts we have. The play The Cherry Orchard (Вишневый сад in the original Russian) comes as a text to help us conceptualise this impasse. As the character Lyubov Andreyevna notes about folk lulled into inescapable comfort, “who have lost the ability to see clearly”, she also pokes fun at those who propose concrete actions and offer real solutions, but in their pragmatic stances seem always to be out of time for their own ideals, with no time and no real affinities toward day-dreaming and reminiscing, no time for irrationally and complaining enough to make a difference. Lopakhin, not without reason a merchant, will thus say: "Cherry trees bear fruit once every two years, and then there’s nothing to be done with its fruit, nobody buys it,” adding: "One ought to clean up around here… For instance, shall we say, tear down all the old buildings, like this old house, it doesn’t serve anything anymore, and while we’re at it cut up the cherry orchard..." The landowner’s point of view, not for long also the owner of the land in question, will be: "I was born here, my father and mother lived here, my grandfather too, I love this house, I cannot bear to imagine it without my the cherry orchard, and if it truly be absolutely necessary to sell it, then sell me with it…”, as Ranyevskaya formulates it, not without a heavy hand irony…

Coproductions are, in the most idyllic of times and in abundant monetary possibilities, healthy for the life of a theatre. In times of crisis, they become imperative. This most recent version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by Dražen Ferenčina and the exciting and excited Osijek-Zagreb duo is a real accomplishment. It is born out of an absolute inability to accept the catastrophic effects of the pandemic. In the beginning the play was “Zoomed” online. Rousing itself whilst exploring its possibilities by way of its initial attempts at a distance from its audience, then into the combined solitudes of its mobile and computer platforms. (...) Then they courageously assembled offline and in only three weeks managed to form a play, face-to-face, worthy of Chekhov’s unaging and mysterious talent. (...) The affliction in the play as well as its almost pathetic optimism become interwoven in Ferenčina’s vision of The Cherry Orchard, as in the finest piece of lacework. (Davor Špišić, Telegram)