Garden Of The Cherry Tree

It was the latest work of the great writer Anton Chejov, a real masterpiece. He was very ill when he wrote it, perhaps his most strange and abstract comedy. Like some of his previously stories, he centres on the lives of a group of people, not good ones nor bad, deep and complicated, shallow and ridiculous, each with his own reason. The title: 'The garden of the cherry trees'. It's been adapted to the theatre in Spain. For a couple of hours, the audience learned something of these character's yearnings, their egoism, indecision, blindness, misery and grandeur.There's a common factor: nobody listens, each seems lost in their own dreams. They don't know what they want, or don't want to know. Part of the action happened in what Chejov called; 'the room of the children', the old playroom of Lubov Andreievna and her brother Gaive. They have returned to the grand mansion of their infancy, now pursued by creditors. Lubov lives in a perpetual escape, to Paris, since the death of her little son, drown in the river. Gaive, with his tender and lunatic humour, also lives in his own fantasy world, plays billiard with neither table nor ball, like the ending in Blow Up. Then there is Lopajin, before a servant, now rather wealthy and eternal admirer of Ludov, is trying very hard to buy the garden of the cherry trees. The brother and sister wouldn't sell. They want everything to remain the same, but not capable of doing so. The room of the children is populated with short circuited desires, shaken by desperate frenzy and madness. They never stop moving about to go nowhere, joking with tears in their eyes, constantly organizing parties and games without real enthusiasm, They speak when they shouldn't, don't when they should; and all of them seem to love the wrong person. "Why do we do what we do?" is the basic question Chejov was asking. Of which Sam Mendes, at the front of the Bridge Project, a transatlantic company with English and American actors, has offered in the theatre here. With full house performance every night, thunderous applause, and considered by all critics unanimously as the best theatre production in recent years. Tags:garden,cherrytrees

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