Cherry Orchard

Sovremennik Moscow theater was doing 4 performances (Chekhov's plays) in London couple of weeks ago. Cherry Orchard play wasn't my favorite option for choice, but we couldn't make it for any other play, so we chose Cherry Orchard. From the name of the theater I expected something completely non classical with elements modern direction. However from the first scene there wasn't any doubt it is going to be classic Cherry Orchard with exactly the same text as I used to remember from old days in school. I thought I am not going to survive. The play was in Russian with English subtitles .To my surprise there were plenty of English people even several groups of school pupils. Language used in the play was original "Tchekhov's" language and even with good translation it wasn't probably well understood by English people. But who knows... It wasn't very long when I started to love the play and was so much into it that I didn't notice how 1.5 hours passed and the first part was over.

Actors were really good, which made me wonder who those actors were. At some point Andrejs asked me if the servant Firs role was played by actor Gaft, to which I replied that it can't possibly be him. I kept hearing Yakovleva's actress' voice throughout all the play but never imagined that the actress was actually Yakovleva herself. Only when I got back home and googled for actors I found out that all of them are very famous Russian actors like Sergey Garmash, Marina Neelova, Elena Yakovleva, Valentin Gaft and others.