I’ve seen Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard 20 times – and it blossoms when tended by the British | Michael Billington

What kind of play is The Cherry Orchard? As a new production starring Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh beckons in Stratford, I am reminded that it is a question people have been asking since the play’s inception. Chekhov himself wrote that what had emerged in his play was “not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce”. Stanislavski, who directed the Moscow premiere in 1904, violently disagreed. “It is a tragedy,” he told Chekhov, “whatever prospect of a better life you hold out in the last act.” While the debate continues, I hope we shall not be told by anyone involved in the new RSC production that they are at long last restoring the play’s comedy. It is a critical cliche that the British sentimentalise the play and treat it as a lament for the decline and fall of a pseudo-Edwardian aristocracy. In my experience of the play – and I have seen about 20 productions – this is simply untrue. We generally do The Cherry Orchard very well because its blend of styles and moods is something baked into our own dramatic heritage. Eschewing the academic formality of the French, for whom tragedy and comedy are rigidly defined genres, we are used to a glorious impurity in drama: a culture that can produce Twelfth Night should have no problem in comprehending The Cherry Orchard. I first saw the play in 1961 in an RSC production directed by Michel Saint-Denis. It was full of laughter, not least in the airy nonchalance of John Gielgud’s Gaev as he ridiculously claimed, “I shall be a financier”: he’s going to work in a bank. But, equally, I have never forgotten the look of haunted sorrow on the face of Dorothy Tutin’s Varya as she knelt downstage packing a trunk, awaiting the marriage proposal from George Murcell’s Lopakhin that never came. Even that had its comic side as Murcell fumbled with the doorknob trying to make his escape. The critic Eric Bentley, as so often, got it right when he said there is nothing nebulous about Chekhov: he is, if anything, precise. That has been…