People and puppets in A.P. Chekhov’s play “The Cherry Orchard”

Abstract

The play “The Cherry Orchard” reflects the principles of conventional theater – theatricality and puppetry, which are associated with the creative searches of innovators in drama and stage art and, in particular, with the early one-act plays for puppets by M. Maeterlinck. Chekhov’s last play is considered in the context of the philosophical and aesthetic concepts of the new drama, on rethinking the understanding of the tragic at the turn of the eras. Although Vs. Meyerhold caught new techniques and rhythms in the play “The Cherry Orchard”, he carried out his first experiment with the use of puppets two years later in the production of A. Blok’s play “The Little Fair Farce”, and in the article “The Fair Farce” (1912) he theoretically generalized practical experience. We will focus on Alexander Yanushkevich’s production of “The Garden” (2018) on the stage of the Petrozavodsk Puppet Theater, in which, more than a hundred years later, an attempt was made to overcome, according to the director, “certain cliches associated with Chekhov’s dramaturgy”. People play puppets, the grotesque exposes the tragic in the notional symbolist theater of Alexander Yanushkevich.