From 15 February to 12 April, the theater Fernán Gómez.Centro Cultural de la Villa de Madrid presents in its Sala Guirau the work El jardín de los cerezos, by Anton Chekhov, in a version of Ignacio García May and directed by Juan Carlos Pérez de la Fuente.
Anton Chekhov’s El jardín de los cerezos (Cherry Orchard) premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky and starring Olga Knipper, Chekhov’s wife. One hundred and twenty years after that premiere, Chekhov has become a classic of universal drama and his theatre has been unveiled by the passage of time and today we understand a little more its universe.
Chekhov is not only talking about the Russia of the late 19th century, but also about people who are disoriented and perplexed in the middle of a crossroads or a maze that stuns them, knocks them out. And they are afraid, very afraid, and deceive life as they expose their highest desires, the most worthy purposes, but with no will to execute them. In our twenty-first century, laden with questions about how our existence will be, at the gates of a new time, we find El jardín de los cerezos, more relevant than ever.
Chekhov’s work tells the story of a family expelled from Paradise. It is, at the same time, a real space (in rigor, the garden of an estate in economic ruin) and another remembered: a happy childhood. The negligence with which the farm has been managed has caused that the only solution for its rescue passes, ironically, by its destruction. That’s why the Chejovian characters are caught in a dilemma typical of modern society: staying is to lose paradise, but selling the estate, too. So they choose to settle down in the store, hoping that things will work themselves out. In the midst of this catastrophe, only young student Trofimov glimpses the possibility of a return to Eden when he declares that salvation comes through working and leaving some happiness for those who come after him. Not in vain, a Chinese proverb explains that the best fertilizer is the shade of the gardener.Tickets can be purchased at this link.