Rating: 
Summary: A dreadful play.
Review: "The Cherry Orchard" is an atrocious play. If we hold this play in high regard, then we dramatist's need to reevaluate our standards. Chekhov wrote a play that will make you not care an inch about the character's or their situation(s). For him to think that this is a comedy makes you wonder if he understood the point he himself was trying to make. The characters are pathetic and they'll make you pity them - not because of their predicaments, but because of whom they are. I do not recommend.
Rating:
Summary: A dreadful play.
Review: "The Cherry Orchard" is an atrocious play. If we hold this play in high regard, then we dramatist's need to reevaluate our standards. Chekhov wrote a play that will make you not care an inch about the character's or their situation(s). For him to think that this is a comedy makes you wonder if he understood the point he himself was trying to make. The characters are pathetic and they'll make you pity them - not because of their predicaments, but because of whom they are. I do not recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: The winds of change are blowing through this orchard
Review: Anton Chekhov's play "The Cherry Orchard" has been published as part of the Dover Thrift Edition series (that's the version I read before writing this review). No translator is credited for this edition. According to the note at the start of the book, the play was initially presented by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904.The play takes place on the estate of Madame Ranevsky, the matriarch of an aristocratic Russian family that has fallen on financial hard times. She faces the possible loss of her family's magnificent cherry orchard. The play is populated with interesting characters: Lopakhin, a wealthy neighbor whose father was the serf of Madame Ranevsky's father; Firs, an aged servant who longs for the "old days"; Trophimof, a student with lofty ideas; and more. There is a great deal of conflict among the characters. "The Cherry Orchard" is about people dealing with very personal conflicts and crises while larger socioeconomic changes are going on around them. The orchard of the title is a memorable image that is well handled by Chekhov. The play contains some really effective dialogue, such as old Firs' reflection on the apparently lost art of making dried cherries. This is definitely one classic play that remains compelling.
Rating:
Summary: The winds of change are blowing through this orchard
Review: Anton Chekhov's play "The Cherry Orchard" has been published as part of the Dover Thrift Edition series (that's the version I read before writing this review). No translator is credited for this edition. According to the note at the start of the book, the play was initially presented by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904. The play takes place on the estate of Madame Ranevsky, the matriarch of an aristocratic Russian family that has fallen on financial hard times. She faces the possible loss of her family's magnificent cherry orchard. The play is populated with interesting characters: Lopakhin, a wealthy neighbor whose father was the serf of Madame Ranevsky's father; Firs, an aged servant who longs for the "old days"; Trophimof, a student with lofty ideas; and more. There is a great deal of conflict among the characters. "The Cherry Orchard" is about people dealing with very personal conflicts and crises while larger socioeconomic changes are going on around them. The orchard of the title is a memorable image that is well handled by Chekhov. The play contains some really effective dialogue, such as old Firs' reflection on the apparently lost art of making dried cherries. This is definitely one classic play that remains compelling.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbeatable price for this historical tragi-comedy
Review: Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is a play about social classes: what their members are, what they do, and how they interact. The problem is, at the turn of the 20th century in Russia, society is evolving and classes distinctions are being effaced to an ever greater degree. The central questions involve how a member of a once-clear caste, whether aristocrat or serf, should now behave in the new social milieu. A character-based analysis seems the most effective way to discuss these issues.
On the one hand are those, such as the old butler Firs, deeply attached to the former ways, who see the past a golden age to be preserved as much as possible. Most of the family also falls into this category. At the other extreme are people like the student Petya, who welcome the changes and, in certain cases, wish for even greater revolution in society. The prosperous merchant Lopakhin, for instance, tends more toward this attitude than the other.
And then there are those who simply live the lives they have always lived out of sheer habit, having no strong feelings about, and indeed largely ignoring, the societal transformations going on around them--much to their detriment. There are the servants, such as the gardener Yepikhodov and the maid Dunyasha, who evince this unambitious and desultory mindset toward their lives. But there are also the two daughters, whose only thought in the world is to get married, though even then it seems more a wish and a fancy that they rest their lives on than a real goal towards which they are committed to work. They likely inherited this trait from their mother Lyubov.
Indeed, Lyubov is one of the two central characters around which the play revolves. The house and the cherry orchard belong to her and her eccentric, overly optimistic, and in some respects naïve brother Gaev. Lyubov is an expensive and an attractive woman. Her chief characteristic, without a doubt, is a lack of continence, both emotionally and fiscally, for the latter often follows the former in her case. The open purse is her symbol. She lives through rose-colored glasses, and because of this is gullible. Betrayed and ruined, she never learns; indeed, at the end of the play we see her returning to Paris, surely to be disappointed once again. She wants everything to work out; but she refuses to adapt and to face the consequences and responsibilities that would allow her plans to succeed. At one point she says, in a trademark quote of hers, "What is one to do in one's life? One is to drink one's coffee." Having lived always in luxury, she is spoiled, and like so many of her class she will not learn her lesson until it is too late.
The other central character of the play is the rich and shrewd peasant Lopakhin. In short, he is a prosperous pragmatist. Through agriculture enterprises and a keen business sense, Lopakhin has amassed a fortune. His mind thinks only of money and of work, never of love or other more human affairs. When romance is suggested, he is receptive to the possibility but is soon pulled from it because it is not central to who he is. He has a sort of tunnel vision, for he is obsessed with proving himself to his serf father's ghost by earning and gaining more and continuously striving to shed the status of peasant, a reproach which clings to him and burns in his memory. This is clearly an inescapable influence in his life. His hands, always working and never at rest, are the center of his character and are symbolic of his essence. He confesses at the end, "I feel like my hands belong to someone else." His statement could hardly be more accurate. Lopakhin represents one side of the serf's struggle to comprehend and to appropriate their newly gained freedoms. "When I work hard," he says, "then I am at peace." In one scene he tries to force Petya to accept money from him, for material prosperity means very little to him. He achieves his external goals, but throughout the play he seems blind as to the direction his internal quest must take. He is seeking to come to rest in an identity, and it is unclear whether he ever does.
This ambiguity is the permeating mood at the end of the play. Society has changed and will continue to do so. But whether any of the characters will find firm identities in the new structure is never resolved. Rather, Chekhov leaves us with the death of the old guard: the butler Firs, pro-aristocrat to the end. This is a visible way of showing that although classes may rise and fall, when a large section of the populace's self-concepts are bound up with a class, change is hard.
Rating:
Summary: A heartbreak and a smile
Review: As I read this play, my family is in the process of moving a thousand miles away from the farm where I grew up. Though I am so far away from the Russian culture and time of this play, the themes of place, tradition, and inevitable change resonated inside of me, and I am grateful to Chekhov for the way he has handled them. The Cherry Orchard is a play about change, and the symbolism is pretty easy to recognize. What makes it stand apart, I think, from a thousand other plays on the same theme is its wonderful sense of comedy, of smiling sadness. Chekhov all his life insisted it was a comedy. As the Cherry Orchard slips away from the Ranevskys, they seem to smile at its going. As they are unable to change their habits -- still lending money they don't have, still spending extravagantly -- they quietly laugh at their own foolishness. The change comes, and they leave, heartbroken -- but embracing the change at the same time, only feebling struggling against it. One feels saddest, in the end, for Lopakhin, the new owner of the Cherry Orchard. He seems to believe he has bought happiness and friends, but is quickly discovering the emptiness of money and possessions, as no one wants to borrow from him, and no one seems to pay him much heed at all. Chekhov paints with a fine brush, and I appreciate that. There is no thunderstorming, no ranting and raving in this work. There is a fine and subtle, sad and comedic portrayal of a family and a place encountering change. It is a heartbreak with a smile. The translation, though the only one I've read, seems good. It is easy to follow and rich in simple feeling. if you'd like to discuss this play with me, or recommend something i might enjoy, or just chat, e-mail me at williekrischke@hotmail.com.
Rating: 
Summary: You can never go home again.
Review: As much as I enjoy Chekhov, I'm not a big fan of THE CHERRY ORCHARD; it never made much sense to me. However, this adaptation by David Mamet makes the play easier to follow and understand. The play itself is often labeled as a tragedy, but really isn't. As Mamet points out in the introduction to this adaptation, the closest form of drama THE CHERRY ORCHARD's structure resembles is the farce. In fact, if all the characters weren't so depressing, the play would be hilarious. Perhaps that is what Chekhov originally intended, that as we would see the outrageous, pitiful existence of the characters in this play we would laugh at their mopping and folly and strive to make our lives more meaningful. This isn't the best work to introduce one to the genius of Chekhov, but it is a classic and if one can get past all the whining (or to use a more pc term "reminiscing") it's worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: You can never go home again.
Review: As much as I enjoy Chekhov, I'm not a big fan of THE CHERRY ORCHARD; it never made much sense to me. However, this adaptation by David Mamet makes the play easier to follow and understand. The play itself is often labeled as a tragedy, but really isn't. As Mamet points out in the introduction to this adaptation, the closest form of drama THE CHERRY ORCHARD's structure resembles is the farce. In fact, if all the characters weren't so depressing, the play would be hilarious. Perhaps that is what Chekhov originally intended, that as we would see the outrageous, pitiful existence of the characters in this play we would laugh at their mopping and folly and strive to make our lives more meaningful. This isn't the best work to introduce one to the genius of Chekhov, but it is a classic and if one can get past all the whining (or to use a more pc term "reminiscing") it's worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Anxious uncertainty makes a fine translation
Review: Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard' is an excellent, layered composition from a notoriously prolific writer. Although good humoured, an air of depression and resignation stalks every moment, as the characters realise they are anachronisms in a rapidly changing capitlist society. Feeling as though it were written by Shakespeare's Hamlet, compelling darkness is portrayed, such as in Yephidov, who carries a revolver with him in case the fleeting notion of suicide becomes too compelling. The genius of such creations is that you are never sure whether the writer means to evince smiles or grimaces.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good translation of a powerful play
Review: People in my line of work (that is, teachers and critics of literature) seem to be paying more attention to "The Sea Gull" these days, but my money is still on "The Cherry Orchard" as favorite Chekhov play. Dover's incomparably priced edition lacks a little in the readability of the translation, but it's still a nice version of a powerful piece of work. For me, the real strength of "The Cherry Orchard" is its unwillingness to come down propagandistically on one side of any issue. The intellectual and eternal student Trophimof levels a critique against capitalism, but one must bear in mind that it is capitalism that engineers the upward rise of the erstwhile peasant (and now landowner) Lopakhin (and, in the context of this play's being labeled a "comedy," I think Chekhov codes this rise as a conditionally good thing). Trophimof in fact seems to be granted a great deal of authority by the play, as he complains about the lazy intelligentsia and the useless aristocracy, but, sure enough, not wanting to make things too simple or simplistic, Chekhov has Madame Ranevsky put him in his place. If this is a commentary on turn-of-the-century Russian society and politics (and I think we must read it as such), it is a very balanced, multi-perspectival and complex one. Even the criticism of the play's upper classes--the focus on Gayef's irrational obsession with billiards or Pishtchik's naive assumption that, when he is in the deepest of financial troubles, something will always come along to bail him out--is delicately balanced against the workaholic insensitivity of Lopakhin, who leaves Varya Ranevsky stranded at the play's end and expecting a proposal of marriage from him that is hinted at but never comes. What Chekhov seems to be supporting is not, perhaps, Trophimof's over-intellectualized and propaganda-like insistence on work, or Lopakhin's materialistic actual obsession with work, but maybe a revaluation of the priorities that have led to social divisions and the problematic reactions to them. One crucial translation hitch appears early on, as Gayef passionately addresses a cupboard and praises it for holding, for so many years, wisdom and knowledge and the keys to social betterment. All other translations I have consulted have rendered this "cupboard" as a "bookshelf," and, to be honest, that makes a lot more sense, in context. Other issues of readability (or the slight lack thereof) in this Dover edition are best seen in comparison to Hingley's imminently readable and enjoyable Oxford UP translation and edition, which, to my mind, remains the standard. This Dover edition's dialogue is occasionally stilted and impenetrable. Still, though, for the price, this copy of "The Cherry Orchard" is unbeatable. It's an impressive and provocative play, and even more so when one is reminded of its original context. It's problematic, of course, to pin events to each other and argue for direct influence, but I have a hard time seeing the workers' uprisings in Russia during the winter of 1905-06 as completely unrelated from this play's release in 1904, which set many of these still vital issues into motion in a very productive way.
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