Chekhov The Cherry Orchard

About The Cherry Orchard

Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904) is his final and arguably greatest play — a work about the dissolution of the Russian gentry class in which nothing happens and everything is lost. The Ranevskaya family returns to their indebted ancestral estate to find that the practical solution (sell the orchard, build dachas) is obvious to everyone except themselves; they talk and weep and delay until the axes fall. Chekhov insisted it was a comedy; Stanislavski played it as a tragedy; the argument has continued for over a century. The Cherry Orchard belongs to Chekhov's four great late plays — with The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, and Three Sisters — and represents the highest achievement of his dramatic method: the theatre of indirection, of what is not said, of the life that happens in the silences.