There was an air of more expensive perfume in the foyers than at a Dutch gala premiere. The women were younger and smoother, or had a better botox doctor than usual. The jewellery looked very expensive, as did the dresses. Russian sounded everywhere. It seemed as if Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg had briefly been moved to PC Hooftstraat, a few hundred metres away. Reason for all this: 'The Cherry Garden', the 1904 masterpiece by Russian Anton Chekhov, played by real Russians from Russia, in Russian. I learnt a lot.
1: That Russian is really needed
When you go to an opera by Verdi, you hear Italian. If you go to see Wagner, you will hear German from the boards. If you go to a play, you hear Dutch. Translated from Russian, English, German, French or Spanish. Apparently, the intelligibility of a play text is more important than the sound, otherwise, of course, such a strange tradition could not exist. As a result, we miss much, very much. Take Chekhov: in terms of content, of course, all his plays are wonderful. The stories are universal, the psychology sharp, the eloquence just as strong even after 110 years. But we don't hear what he wrote. One example. The central character in 'The Cherry Garden' is a fallen rich lady, who returned penniless from Paris and now has to watch her estate go bankrupt. Her name is Lyubov. At some point, her Parisian lover telegraphs her that he wants her back. She also wants her back and exclaims that she still loves him. So in Dutch that sounds like this: "I love him!". But in Russian, she sings "Ya lyublyoe!" three times. At that Russian performance, I understood Chekhov's joke for the first time: through that rime of sound, he skillfully portrays her as a narcissist: she is mostly in love with herself. You don't hear that in Dutch. Thanks to the surtitles, I now understood everything. Shakespeare also sounds better in the original language, by the way. Although the Klingons disagree.
2: Slow can be done, as long as the volume is right
Russian director Lev Dodin has cut the necessary bits in the text of 'The Cherry Garden'. That gives him the opportunity to play what is left nice and slow, even though everyone is outside again after three hours. Was that slow pace soporific? Certainly not. Helping with that is the actors' more than excellent speech technique. You don't understand their Russian, but because you notice that you don't miss a syllable and get all the emotions in the voices, you stay enthralled watching. We lost that aspect of acting a bit here. We are used to whispering in semi-darkness thanks to the contact microphones that every actor gets to wear from day 1 at drama school, while the sound is audible from the speakers and cannot always be traced to a speaking mouth on stage. Then you have to play fast and flashy, because image and sound are disconnected, which is disastrous in a small venue like a theatre. I still prefer to see and hear actors with fabulous technique, where the sound also comes out of their mouths, like those Russians.
3: Chekhov gives everyone their own story
'The Cherry Garden', which centres on the sale of the family orchard to a former serf, appeals to every generation. We always recognise something in it. We see our certainties crumbling, while new social realities emerge. Was Chekhov indeed writing about his time? Does each character represent social class in a class struggle that was barely even allowed to be called that? Or is it also about an even more universal struggle between generations? Doesn't every arrived fifty-something sometimes feel threatened or even overtaken by younger generations? Chekhov offers plenty of material for any interpretation. Director Lev Dodin makes the great hall of the City Theatre itself the setting. So one cannot help but think that he wants to say something about a generational and class struggle in theatre. The old grand landowners are then the old theatre-makers, who cannot part with their old forms, and the self-made businessman Lopachin, who takes over and throws it against the ground, is then either a trigger-happy Halbe Zijlstra, who puts the chainsaw into art, or a brash theatre innovator who wants to rigorously sweep through old forms.
The Russians in the hall saw in this Lopachin, above all, a like-minded person, as was evident from the many interjected ovations they had in store for him.
4: Tell, don't show
There is quite a bit of sex going on in this show. Not on stage, but behind the scenes. Characters whom Chekhov pitted against each other in silent yearning break down that tension here by diving behind the stage-wide film screen with carnal fervour and coming out from behind it again with tangled hair and sweaty. And the accountant who in the original work is mostly an endearing bum, here turns out to be a violent sex maniac.
5: The butler must move
And he wasn't doing that enough now. I missed that quite a bit. At the end. That tear in the corner of my eye.
Photo above: Viktor Vassiliev
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