Chekov

I remember once some time back hearing that Chekov said to someone concerning a character in one of his, Chekov's, plays: "You must remember, he wears yellow shoes." I did not know what he meant then but now I have an inkling, having just come back from London's Old Vic Theatre and seeing "The Cherry Orchard".
At the beginning of the play Lophakin, the serf made good - or at least, made wealthy - is telling to a servant about himself and in so doing he mentions that he now wears yellow shoes. Why tell someone this? Because, I suppose, in his eyes it meant that he was now an important someone, not the serf he once was, but a person of distinction.
But, of course, he isn't. He has made a lot of money but that doesn't mean he has successfully transformed himself into a cultured gentleman or, which is more important to people of an upper class, into a member of the upper class. You can't do that by wearing what you think will be accepted, like yellow shoes - which would not be accepted. But Lophakin doesn't think this way.
Reminds me a little of Malvolio who wore yellow stocckings which were laughed at.
Stanislavsky apparently directed the play as if it were a tragedy whereas Chekov had regarded it as a comedy. There are tragic elements in it of course but they are not of the highest level in whih, say, a great person is brought down to ignominy. The wealthy family in "The Cherry Orchard" is brought down but it's not "the end of the world" for them. Comedy, to Chekov, I think, meant that the characters are living lives which do not reflect the way society is changing; they are stuck in the past. When a man like Lophakin comes along and attempts to shake them out of the coma-like state they are in, he becomes ridiculous but they become absurd. And there is a high comic element in this.
Chekov broke one of his rules in this play: he said that if there is a gun on the wall in Act 1 it must be fired before the end of the play. Well, there was a gun brandished in Act 1 but it was never fired.

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.