Chekov

Are Chekov's plays tragedies or comedies? When he wrote "The Cherry Orchard" he told Stanislavski, the play's director, that he had written a comedy. Stanislavski, however, decided that it was a tragedy and performed it that way.
I always regard them as comedies but nothing like comedies as we know them from music hall acts to Noel Coward's upper class musings on life while they're doing not very much in the way of work. (Chekov's characters too are quite lazy and now I come to think of it, having recently seen "Hay Fever", there are certain similarities in that the main female actor in the Coward play is very like Madame Ranevsky in "The Cherry Orchard"). One of the problems directors get with Chekov is that sometimes they decide to play him for laughs and end up with a Russian version of a Brian Rix farce; another is that if they play it as tragedy the characters take on the moods of people at a funeral, moaaning about life and death.
There is a way of doing Chekov as serious and comic. I think this is by making the characters play their parts for real, as serious as they possibly could be - then the laughs or, rather, chuckles come. For the characters do moan and whine a lot but they do so in an absurd way.
I once saw a production of "The Seagull" directed by Tony Richardson with his then wife Vanessa Redgrave in it and it was a laugh from beginning to end.
Yet in "The Cherry Orchard" the family has to leave their cherished land and live in near poverty, they have to give up their lovely cherry orchard and live in the city and they have to bear the fact that their former serf, Lopahkin, has purchased it from them and intends to profit from the sale by building blocks of apartments there. What could be more dismal if not tragic? Well, it isn't. Anything but. Probably it has to do with Chekov being such a great artist that one feels great excitment while watching the play and this feeling cheers the intellect.
I have booked to see "The Cherry Orchard" in July with Ethan Hawke in it. He must surely be going to play Lopahkin. Now I have to admit you don't laugh at Lopahkin, you kind of feel sorry for him yet admire his newfound ambition. Hawke will perform that role to perfection I think.