Following "The Seagull," "The Sneeze," "Three Sisters" and "Uncle Vanya," "The Cherry Orchard" is the final play in a series titled "Chekhov: The Work of the Soul" staged by the New National Theatre, Tokyo.
The Russian dramatist and short-story author Anton Pavlovich Chekhov started writing at 16, to pay his way through medical school in Moscow after his father went bankrupt. He died of tuberculosis at age 44, seven months after "The Cherry Orchard," his last play, premiered in Moscow in 1904. This is his best-known and most popular work in Japan. Consequently, the auditorium was packed, mainly with middle-aged and elderly people dutifully absorbed in reading the program before the curtain rose, to glean what they could about the play and the life of its remarkable creator.
Director Tamiya Kuriyama, who is also artistic director of the New National Theatre, set the play in Meiji 44 (1911) in the Shinshu area of Nagano Prefecture, where -- then, as now -- many of Japan's most noble and wealthy maintain second homes. The tale is of Ranevskaya (the character is renamed Urarako Kayano here and played by Mitsuko Mori), who has returned to her estate, The Cherry Orchard, after a five-year sojourn in France, oblivious to both her own imminent bankruptcy and the firmament of the times. Kuriyama explained that he chose a Japanese setting so audiences could more easily understand its complex social dynamics and to demonstrate Chekhov's "eternal meanings."