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Thanks to Mary Lynn T.
Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is a captivating tale of a Russian aristocratic household that comes face to face with adversity. Chekhov's final play, it was first performed and published in 1904. This well known drama hints at the social upheaval that was beginning in pre-revolutionary Russia. Though Chekhov insisted that the play was "a comedy, in places even a farce," audiences often find a touch of tragedy in the decline of the Ranyevskaya family. Madame Ranyevskaya (Dench), a charming landowning aristocrat who has spent five years in Paris to escape the grief over her young son's death, returns to her Russian home ridden with debt. She is obliged to decide how to dispose of her family's estate, with its beautiful and famous cherry orchard. The coarse but wealthy merchant Ermolai Lopakim (Bernard Hill) suggests that Mme Ranyevskaya develop the land on which the orchard sits. Eventually Lopakim purchases the estate and proceeds with his plans for a housing development. This merchant's buying of the precious piece of land, which is Mme Ranyevskaya's security as well as her dearest reminder of her dead son, portrays the changes in the Russian social structure that were emerging at that time - the moneyed middle class usurping the landed aristocracy. As the unhappy Ranyevskayas leave the estate, the sound of saws can be heard in the orchard.
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