The Cherry Orchard

An estate featuring a magnificent cherry orchard, which even has its own encyclopaedia entry and holds an immense personal and symbolic value will, due to a dire financial situation brought on by rather banal life circumstances, have to be sold and the orchard cut down. This seemingly simple story of a once-wealthy family losing their money and their property conveys the inevitability of the end of an era, the kind to which ordinary people react with complete emotional paralysis. It doesn’t matter whether we read The Cherry Orchard as a metaphor for lost time, childhood, ideals or something entirely unrelated: we have all, at some point, unwillingly parted from something dear to us, and in this sense, Lyubov Andreyevna’s cherry trees are no different from our intimate experiences. Furthermore, in a world that is rapidly losing its footing amid social, economic, environmental and existential crises, the characters like her and people around her are no longer simply Russian aristocrats in decline, but recognisable figures from everyday life.

Staging The Cherry Orchard means asking questions about loss, impermanence, decline, slavery to money and the inability to genuinely internalise change, even as it constantly unfolds in the world around us. Individuals facing the end of an era find themselves lost in the irrevocably changing world, and quite incapable of experiencing this transformation as an opportunity rather than a loss. It is precisely the inertia of Chekhov’s characters that makes the play, known for its sentimentality, profoundly comic – which, after all, is the genre that the author assigned to it. On the other hand, the small gestures and silences, the gentle subtlety and the slow-burning conflicts that eventually implode make the play even more poignant and thus the perfect material for drama theatre and the intricate and nuanced ensemble acting. The play about the mourned orchard – a crossroads of destinies that meet after so many years only to (probably) part very quickly, and forever, will be the Nova Gorica debut for the Croatian director Tamara Damjanović and her directorial-dramaturgical approach marked by the absence of overt drama.   

No one truly wants to leave or part ways, and yet, that is life.

_{Ivo Andrić}