Review of Anton Fedorov’s performance “The Cherry Orchard” at the Voronezh Chamber Theater

On November 21, its creator and artistic director Mikhail Bychkov was fired from the Voronezh Chamber Theater. Following him, several leading actresses announced their departure from the Chamber, including those who were involved in the theater’s recent premiere, Anton Fedorov’s play “The Cherry Orchard.” I managed to see one of the last shows of “The Cherry Orchard” Marina Shimadina.

The chamber theater, without a doubt, is the author’s theater of Mikhail Bychkov, created and lovingly grown by him, like that very cherry orchard. However, he invited other directors to the productions. The last and most successful creative alliance was the work with Anton Fedorov, one of the brightest and most significant figures of the new generation. A student of Yuri Pogrebnichko, he staged at the theater “Near the Stanislavsky House”, at the “Gogol Center” and the space “Inside”, worked a lot in the provinces, and in 2023 he headed the Novosibirsk theater “Old House”. His first production at the Voronezh Chamber Theater – “The Child” based on the play by then not yet Nobel laureate Jun Fosse – received the Golden Mask as the best small-form performance.

The premiere “The Cherry Orchard” could also qualify for this award, but its future (as well as the fate of “The Mask” itself, which is awaiting a radical reformatting) is now cut to the ground. Natalya Shevchenko, one of the four actors who stood at the origins of the theater and plays Ranevskaya here, as well as the young actress Yana Kuzina, playing the role of Varya (she was also busy in Fedorov’s “Child”), together with their colleague Tatyana Babenkova, decided to leave the theater after the dismissal of Mikhail Bychkov. They agreed to finish the performances in November and December, since tickets for them had already been sold. In this context, the recent premiere began to be perceived completely differently.

The most interesting thing about Fedorov’s production is the work with the text. Polished by hundreds of productions, it sounds here like a new drama, with absolutely today’s intonations. Moreover, before our eyes, the text of the play disintegrates into pixels, disperses into atoms and drowns in some inarticulate stream of whispers and shouts, interjections, confused idioms, sighs and exclamations. If in Chekhov’s plays, as is believed, no one hears anyone, then here it is even more so – everyone speaks at the same time. Or they remain silent together. And in these gaps, in the interlines, in the frightened stream of consciousness, galloping like a pre-infarction cardiogram, there is more Chekhovian despair and at the same time Chekhovian humor than in textbook phrases familiar to toothache.

Let me remind you that the play takes place in the summer, from May to August. However, the atmosphere of the performance is rather November. The heroes wear jackets, and Ranevskaya wears a cloak half-pulled off her shoulders, as if she can’t decide whether to leave or stay. On the back wall, live video is broadcast from a cramped room “inside the house”, where the characters sometimes go to play ping-pong, drink tea or just sleep. The last little island of warmth and comfort. Anton Fedorov usually creates the scenography for his productions himself. In The Cherry Orchard, its main element is a large puddle in the middle of the scene, in which the bare branches of the trees are reflected. And she shows the character of each character in different ways: Gaev carefully walks around the puddle so as not to get his suede boots wet, and Ranevskaya splashes right through the water in branded sneakers, not noticing anything.

Unexpectedly, one of the brightest, literally, characters turns out to be the neighboring landowner Simeonov-Pishchik (Oleg Lukonin). He wears an orange suit, struts across the stage with giant strides, and kicks croquet balls into a puddle. At the same time, the rest do not understand who he is at all, and the presence of an eccentric stranger in the middle of a family drama only raises the degree of absurdity inherent in the play by Chekhov. Like the ridiculous tricks of Charlotte Ivanovna (Tamara Tsyganova) or the antics of Epikhodov (Mikhail Gostev), who is jealous of the pretty Dunyasha (Marina Pogoreltseva) of the homely Yasha (Andrei Averyanov) and wonders whether his opponent has read Kafka, Marquez, or even Vodolazkin?

The main “magician” here is Gaev, performed by Kamil Tukaev. He squares, if not cubes, his hero’s reasoning, chatting almost incessantly. So Anya’s response (Anastasia Pavlyukova): “Uncle, you need to be silent!” – sounds more than justified. With his chatter he is trying to obscure, to speak up, the terrible thing that looms ahead. The scene where he must inform his sister about the sale of the estate turns into an attraction: Ranevskaya sits in the center of a puddle on a swivel office chair, and Gaev, like a circus horse, runs around and talks some kind of utter nonsense, from time to time taking it out of the trunk all new packages with anchovies and Kerch herrings. Against the background of his hysteria, Ranevskaya’s icy calm and patience seem like the indifference of a living dead. After making sure that the garden is sold, she gets into the car – an old Volkswagen that stalls every now and then – and never gets out of it.

And the rest here are people without a future. Maybe because they are hopelessly stuck in the past. Lopakhin (Vasily Shumsky) is by no means the winner of life here, internally he remained the same “peasant” whom his father beat. And he himself is not happy with the plans to set up summer cottages, cafes and farm shops within walking distance on the estate’s site. And Petya Trofimov (Andrei Novikov) doesn’t believe in anything – he is completely absorbed, overwhelmed with guilt for the death of his student Grisha. He walks barefoot, like a holy fool, and carries Anya in his arms, as if trying to save, at least protect her. Or he kneels in the same puddle where the ghost of a drowned boy sometimes appears. And in the finale, the forgotten Firs (Nikolai Gavrilin), having performed a mind-blowing breakdance as a farewell, falls face down into the water.

And here I remember “Kostik” by Dmitry Krymov at the Pushkin Theater (cancelled, like all of Krymov’s performances in Moscow theaters), where in almost the same puddle – all that was left of the “witch’s lake” – lay face down an armless, useless man Treplev. And this is not the only theatrical allusion: in the car the characters are listening to a recording of the old Moscow Art Theater production of “The Cherry Orchard,” and Kamil Tukaev at some point breaks the fourth stage and directly addresses the audience, hinting that the garden is both us, the audience, and the artists , and the theater itself.