In 2014 the world finally spun off its axis into a suffocating vortex of incomprehension (just like the last half of Interstellar). Yet consolation was always available in the form of culture, which continued despite the progressing apocalypse. The next few posts will include some of this year's cultural consolers and a few of its challengers too - from Chekhov to Aphex Twin, the Oxford historian Selina Todd to the posthumous Vaclav Havel, Gang of Four to Gyorgy Lucacs, Nietzsche to the economist Thomas Piketty and many more.
9. The Cherry Orchard by
Anton Chekhov directed by Katie Mitchell at the Young Vic
One
of Chekhov's most celebrated plays, The
Cherry Orchard sees
an aristocratic Russian household and its various hangers-on tumble
into disaster as their estate is bought up by a rising rural
bourgeois and scion of Emancipated serfs. Springing up everywhere in
the work of Chekhov are the complex interactions of class in the social imaginary of modernity. This is
why Chekhov, the exemplary son of mercantile traders, remains so
widely staged (second only to Shakespeare): for anywhere fallen under
the spell of market-based modernity, nothing exports so well as the point of contact between age, class and time.
Katie
Mitchell's staging at
the Young Vic received largely positive write-ups, but it was a mixed
review in the Telegraph
that
was most attentive to it:
... at times you can't see the wood for the trees. What is being
said? Why does it matter? Some characters speak with their backs to
the audience and mutter too. The naturalism becomes so studied as to
risk looking artificial, the lack of ostentation tips into its
opposite, something showy. There's a lot of bustle, but little that
moves you.
True,
the naturalistic staging is itself almost hyper-real. It is at the
same time almost
a parody of social realism by means of that genre's paraphernalia:
the crumbly walls; the unmade bed; the thinning curtains. And
sticking out like a sore thumb in this setting are the sudden,
off-stage jolts (of a steam-train or a blackout or a chainsaw), which
serve not only to remind the audience that this is all a construction
but also to menace the characters themselves with their own
vulnerability. These elements of the spectacular cut through the
traditional naturalism in an effort to create the very peaks of
dramatic tension that naturalism itself is supposed to disavow. Thus
the pervasive atmosphere of gloom in Mitchell's production of a play
which Chekhov himself insisted was a comedy. In this sense the
production stays close to the question of form Chekhov himself was
asking: how, in a modern context, to shape dramatic effect? Some
critics complained that Mitchell's production leaned too heavily on
the tragic (Stanislavski did the same); yet the ambiguity - the
movement between tragedy and comedy - is structural
and
integral to the play's probing of the difficulties of staging modern drama.
The
name of Nietzsche is raised once (by the drunken Pischin: "My
daughter tells me he says it's possible to forge banknotes!"),
though only to gently satirize the narrow horizons of the rural
landowner for whom the next payment is all. Yet it was Nietzsche who
declared that the "rebirth of tragic man" - dead since
Socrates and disdained by modern passivity - was possible only
through violent sacrifice: "The tragic man affirms even the
harshest of suffering." The critic Gyorgy Lucacs displaced
Nietzsche's "tragic" problematic onto a class terrain, in
which the possibility of tragic drama is limited by its particular,
bourgeois setting. In "The
Sociology of Modern Drama,"
Lucacs
argued that the intersections between classes had become as important
as the confrontation of men of the same class in traditional drama:
"Because men collide who come from different situations, value
judgements must necessarily function as importantly, at least, as
purely individual characteristics." The structure of modern
society has created a complex dramatic environment in which different
worlds - and the worldviews [Weltanschauungen]
that support them - collide. This intensifying complexity of social
perspectives means that, rather than individuals locked in conflict
with each other, we have sets of social values embodied in particular
characters. Because of this complexity, and the structuring presence
of the social, it also became possible to question the notion of the
"heroic" act, of the self-propelling individual, central to
traditional drama. Herein lies the challenge to both the dramatic
"hero" and the dramatist: as Lucacs asks, "How can man
achieve a tragic action? Is it indeed he who achieves it?"
Chekhov
goes further even than Lucacs in suggesting that class perspectives
do not simply "collide"; indeed they may even - at the
level of the imaginary - cross-pollinate. As so often with Chekhov it
is parody that provides the formal grounds for exploring this
cross-pollination. Having purchased the estate from the family the
rural bourgeois, Lopakhin, shakes his fists at the heavens and
invokes the names of his ancestors, once serfs under the Ranevskys.
His moment of victory is at the same time the play's tragic
dénouement. Lopakhin is an archetypal "practical man",
though invested by Chekhov with a keen sense of ancestral pedigree.
As Lucacs again puts it: "The world of drama is one where "past"
and "future", "no longer" and "not yet",
come together in a single moment." At a very fundamental level
the impulse of Lopakhin is to vanquish this set of historical
encounters as so many demons. "You," he tells Mme.
Ranevskaya, who helped raise him, "helped me forget all that
history."
Lopakhin is right in a perverse way: Mme. Ranevskaya longs to find a
place outside of history - a place, that is, of shelter in memory; in
a collective, familial project which opposes the martial imperatives
of progress. "Here you are," she says to the cherry orchard
in which she played as a child, "again and again and again."
The orchard is for the Ranevskys a symbol of childhood and innocence;
the realized force of nostalgia which acts as a shelter from history.
If the message is that the orchard must go, must be destroyed by the
forward march of time, it is not delivered with any zeal. Indeed, it
is with deep regret that the Ranevskys leave the stage to the likes
of Lopakhin. "You're necessary in a way," the student
radical and romantic Trofimov tells Lopakhin. Yet Lopakhin - the
practical man of commerce, releasing himself from the bondage of the
past by his own ingenuity - mirrors the student radical Trofimov with
his belief in progress. "All our philosophical chat has only one
purpose... namely to distract," Trofimov says, preferring action
to words in an echo of the Marxist dictum: "Until now the
philosophers have only interpreted the world... the trick is to
change it." Our sympathies, however modern in form, gesture
towards the nostalgia of the aristocratic, familial project; towards
a constructed inheritance with an emphasis on perpetual youth and
innocence, sheltered permanently from history itself. The Ranevskys
are the image of a vanquished antiquity, the stain of the past in the
present.
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