The Cherry Orchard

coming up, but there's a lot happening in London.

I'm very excited about Kristen Scott Thomas and Stephen Magan in The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov's great play.

Christine Baranski, the brilliant two-time Tony Award-winning actress, coming to the West End in Hayfever.

I love Hayfever.

Hello, a theater buff returns home in the aftermath of a shocking loss.

How does one deal with grief? How about mounting a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard? We'll talk to novelist Rachel Pastin about this scenario today on the History of Literature.

Okay, here we go.

Welcome to the podcast.

If it falls short... then it's not doing what I'm hoping that it's doing.

And if Chekhov can't provide it for us, maybe no one can.

Now, I did an episode on the cherry orchard before, way back when, and that episode, which is in our archives, includes a discussion with Mike Palindrome.

And here's what I said about the play to help orient the listener.

Yeah.

And it was Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, yeah.

It was a modern adaptation setting, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, in the American South.

That's right.

And then before that, the first time we ever met was, it would have been...

My dad loves this story.

I went to the dress room.

My dad was doing this thing called the Bridge Project where he was doing the cherry orchard and a winner's tale in rep, which is extremely cool.

In thenews.com.au, Daniela also writes, Chekhov had a theory when it came to writing, show, don't tell.

Clearly, Kate, the Princess of Wales, is a student of Mr Cherry Orchard himself.

There she was on Thursday in Liverpool wearing an Adeline Lee suit and kicking off the new working royal year by giving us a no-nonsense business princess, looking more like the CEO of a company gearing up to IPO than someone familiar with the technicalities of ribbon cutting.

See that, Mr and Mrs supposedly living in the Cotswolds? What Kate seemed to be Chekhovianly showing was strength in a keep calm and keep power suiting on.

They stare with equal unintelligence at the sieges and stormings of separate homesteads by Ibsen or Strindberg, and at the attack all along the front of refined society into which these sieges and stormings have now developed.

Whether the attack is exquisite, touching, delicate, as in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, Galsworthy's Silver Box, and Granville Barker's Anne Leet, or ruthless with every trick of intellectual ruffianism and ribaldry, and every engine of dramatic controversy, there is the same pettish disappointment at the absence of the old conventions, the same gaping unconsciousness of the meaning and purpose of the warfare in which each play is a battle, as in the days when this book was new.

Our political journalists are even blinder than our artistic ones in this matter.

The credit of our domestic ideals having been shaken to their foundations as through a couple of earthquake shocks by Ibsen and Strindberg, the arch-individualists of the 19th century, whilst the socialists have been idealizing, sentimentalizing, denouncing capitalism for sacrificing love and home and domestic happiness and children and duty to money, greed, and ambition.

Do Oswald Alving, Hedvig Ekdahl, Rosmer and Rebecca, Hedda Gabler, Stolness, Eyolf, Borkman, Rubek and Irene die dramatically natural deaths? Or are they slaughtered in the classic and Shakespearean manner, partly because the audience expects blood for its money, partly because it is difficult to make people attend seriously to anything except by startling them with some violent calamity? It is so easy to make out a case for either view that I shall not argue the point.

The post-Ibsen playwrights apparently think that Ibsen's homicides and suicides were forced.

In Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, for example, where the sentimental ideals of our amiable, cultured, Schumann-playing property class are reduced to dust and ashes by a hand not less deadly than Ibsen's because it is so much more caressing, nothing more violent happens than that the family cannot afford to keep up its old house.

In Granville Barker's plays, the campaign against our society is carried on with all Ibsen's implacability, but the one suicide in Waste is unhistorical, for neither Parnell nor Dilke, who were the actual cases in point of the waste which was the subject of the play, killed himself.

I actually spoke to Rachel about her new novel in which a young woman and theater aficionado returns to her family home after her mother's sudden death.

And to help put some pieces back together, she winds up staging a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

I think you all know me well enough to know that that novel is right up my alley and we are going to run that conversation at a later date.

In the meantime, we wanted to bring you a portion of our conversation in which Rachel tells me all about the decision she and a friend made to open an independent bookstore, Celia Bookshop, in Swarthmore.

Right.

And the play was Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

Now, the guest director of this specific community play happened to be a man named Vincent Dowling.

And Dowling wasn't just a local guy.