Cherry Orchard: Closer, Familiar, Summerweight Contact

Choi Young Joo*

Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, adapted and directed by Simon Stone; translation and dramaturgy: Lee Dan-bee; set design: Saul Kim; costume design: Mel Page; lighting design: James Farncombe; sound design: Jang Young- gyu. Première at LG Arts Center, Seoul, South Korea, 4 June 2024.

Korean theatre audiences became familiar with Simon Stone through NT LIVE’s Yerma and ITA LIVE’s Ibsen’s House and Medea in the early 2020s. They admired his technique of rewriting the classics to reveal aspects of contemporary life that were shockingly welcomed. It was a sharp and penetrating look at contemporary life. They also found that the vibrancy of his colloquial language enlivened the dramatic situations and made them seem real. The news that he would be rewriting and directing The Cherry Orchard with Korean actors in collaboration with LG Arts Center was all the more welcome. Later, there was more news about the casting of top Korean film stars Jeon Do-yeon and Park Hae-soo. This piqued the audience’s interest in how Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard would relate to Korean society and what kind of performance it would be with Korean film stars on stage. The result was a sold-out run from 4 June to 7 July, despite the unusually high ticket prices.

Saul Kim’s sculptural set. Photo: LG Arts Center, Studio AL

Upon entering the theatre, the white stage draws the audience’s attention, while the white frame of the building, visible from the inside, conspicuously emphasizes its three-dimensionality. The set seems to be a Stone favourite, as in Ibsen’s House and Medea, where the white colour erases the memory of the previous texts and creates an environment where any colour or movement can enter the stage as if it were a canvas. This stage is a continuation of Stone’s performance history. Song Do-young’s (Ranevskaya’s) house is an upper-class house that could have been built in the early 1960s. However, the house, designed by architect Saul Kim, is more than just a set and gives the impression of a sophisticated and solid work of design. In particular, the diagonal staircase from floor to roof adds to the aesthetic spatiality. The sculptural set, with its diagonal and straight lines, creates a visual narrative in the white, empty space, multi-layering and transforming it. The thematic meaning of the house becomes the center of visual sensation in the performance. The performance dynamically guides the audience’s gaze, as the actors move in and out of the house, downstairs, upstairs and on to the roof.

The audience’s attention is drawn first and foremost to the cast. Famous film stars rarely appear on stage in Korea. While Park Hae-soo (Lopakhin) has occasionally demonstrated his acting skills on stage, actress Jeon Do-yeon (Ranevskaya) has never stepped from screen to stage. For fans of Korean theatre, her appearance is extremely newsworthy. In general, they had a preconception that a mixed ensemble of media actors and stage actors with famous names would be difficult to pull off. Some found the media actors’ use of microphones at the beginning of the show particularly uncomfortable and distracting, perhaps due to technical difficulties or mistrust.

Ranevskaya (Jeon Do-yeon, left), Gayev (Son Sang- gyu) and Anya (Lee Ji-hye) resting after the birthday party. Photo: LG Arts Center, Studio AL

As they got used to it, they began to see the actors within the content of the performance. Not surprisingly, Jeon Do-yeon (Ranevskaya) was the center of the audience’s attention. Even though some were not particularly interested in her, her every move and look drew their attention. They found themselves commenting on how good her trench coat looked on her, or how lovely and pretty she was even in middle age. Son Sang-gyu’s performance as Song Jae-hee (Gayev), who was outstanding in Emmanuel Noblet’s Réparer les vivants (2016), once again confirmed the actor’s strong acting base. Despite having fewer lines, his presence was unmistakable due to his multifaceted character. Park Hae-soo, as Hwang Doo-sik (Lopakhin), was able to convey the character’s repressed psychology in his body, which explodes at the end of the performance when he takes over the house.

Jeon Do-yeon (Ranevskaya) at center of the stage. Photo: LG Arts Center, Studio AL

As the director could not join rehearsals every time, the rehearsal director worked with the actors in a more comfortable atmosphere. The actors’ expressions are very natural and free, perhaps because the director’s “trick” of “relying on the actors,” rather than directing and explaining, encouraging them to “do a new performance every day, try something different and show something new,” worked. It seems that this openness in the rehearsal process resulted in them sharing ideas and finding movement with their bodies. This, combined with the director’s enthusiastic cheering and admiration for the movements in rehearsal, filled the actors with confidence. As a result, the actors were able to dispel any concerns about the ensemble and fill the stage with free and active expression, uninhibited by the text. Stone’s deliberate organization of the dialogue, which is unusually fragmented and overlapping rather than sequentially unfolding from one character to the next, and of the space, also dynamically distributed the audience’s attention. Accordingly, all the actors could share the audience’s attention impartially, whether in leading or supporting roles. In particular, Song Hae-na’s ( Anya’s) birthday party scene fills the stage with a large group of drunken characters singing and dancing as Song Do-young kisses Hae-na’s lover, Byun Dong-rim (Trofimov, played by Nam Yoon-ho). In this scene, the conflicts and secrets of the characters in the house are also revealed.

With Cherry Orchard, the LG Arts Center’s production capabilities seem to have been upgraded. Internationally acclaimed Australian writer and director Simon Stone was invited to create a luxurious and sophisticated staging, and famous screen stars Jeon Do-yeon and Park Hae-soo were on stage. This is something that no other private or public theatre in Korea would even attempt. For more than a month, the theatre was filled to capacity, and the theatre experience became a topic of discussion among middle-class audiences, who had previously shown little interest in the theatre. What’s more, their response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The company is now preparing to take the show overseas. This would be a testament to the existence of a big brand theatre with strong capital and production experience, international networking, the hopes of the actors and the trust of the audience.

As the excitement of the show wore off, a few dissenting observations crossed my mind. Although a successful Korean version of The Cherry Orchard has been created, it is somehow thinner than the original and lacks a deep aftertaste. That’s because Stone understands Korean society through Korean movie and drama, and it’s hard not to feel you’ve seen something similar before. I wondered if there were such melodramatic elements in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, so I looked up the original. In Chekhov’s play, Ranevskaya belongs to the Russian feudal class, and her bankruptcy is a sign of the emerging capitalist class. The grand narrative of history was mixed with the personal narrative. LG Arts Center’s The Cherry Orchard is also set against the backdrop of the modernization of Korean society. However, the author rhetorically refers to the history of the original play. While the aesthetically pleasing and luxurious set successfully creates the dynamic movement of the actors, it fails to capture the poetic sorrow of the original. The sense of loss evoked by the cherry trees being cut down in the original is absent in this production. Short, staccato, overlapping lines also reinforce the sense of presence rather than emotional communication. In order to give the audience as much information as possible, the dialogue is sometimes too descriptive and banal. Above all, Jeon Do-yeon seems to be not tightly enough absorbed into Song Do-young’s character. As pleasing as it is to see Jeon Do-yeon, we see too much of her before we get to see Song Do-young (Ranevkaya).

*Choi Young Joo: theatre critic, dramaturge and translator since 1999. She has written mainly for the two journals Korean Theatre and Korean Theatre Criticism. Her critical foundation is rooted in Korean theatre culture, but she has a strong interest in cross-cultural communication.

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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