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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2009
This paper examines the different meanings of the monochromatic principle and the act of voiding in two productions of The Cherry Orchard – Georgio Strehler's renowned, predominantly white production (1974) and an Israeli production directed by Yevgeny Arye at the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv (2006), in which a white canopy hung over the stage. In both cases, the perception of the space negates the independent reality of the place, shaping it rather as a potential space. The visual formation that realizes the principle of potentiality – in any production, in any variation – is used as a ground on which mental and imaginary projections are cast. Characters acting in such a space are, to use Bloch's terms, in a state of ‘not yet’ – expecting and hoping to realize their potential lives. In addition, the stage space is constructed in both productions, albeit in different ways, as an intermediate space – a potential space, in Winnicott's terms – that is filled up with transitional objects and games. Chekhov's characters exist in the gap between mergence with the object and separation of the subject, and thus also between past and future. Suspension of the reality principle and pseudo-liberation from its realization are a psychoanalytic version of utopia. Such an existence is utopian also by dint of being an ideological model based – contrary to our sociopolitical realities – on subject–object unity, radically expressed by means of the dominant white monochrome.
1 Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, tr. Mitchell, Arthur (New York: The Modern Library, 1944), p. 308Google Scholar.
2 Danto, Arthur C., After the End of Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 170Google Scholar.
3 Descriptions of the Piccolo Teatro production are based on a video documentation, assisted by published articles. See Dan Urian, ‘A White Cherry Orchard à la Georgio Strehler’, Bamah, 79–80 (1978–9), pp. 138–44 (in Hebrew); Pia Kleber, ‘The Whole Italy Is Our Orchard: Strehler's Cherry Orchard’, Drama Review, 42 (1999), pp. 579–94. Kleber emphasizes the correlation between the whitened space (and other elements) and the local context – southern Italy's landscape.
4 See Rose, Barbara, ed., Monochromes from Malevich to the Present (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
5 While the usual distinction is between achromatic colours (black, grey and white) and chromatic colours, in this text monochromatic designates any single color.
6 Descriptions of the production are based on two live viewings in 2006 and video documentation.
7 The Gesher Theater was founded in 1991 by Arye, who was a successful director in Moscow prior to his immigration to Israel with a group of immigrant Russian actors, later joined by some Israeli-born actors. The theatre, still led by Arye and located in Jaffa (bordering on Tel Aviv), is bilingual, producing plays in both Russian and Hebrew (lately focusing more on Hebrew productions). See, including fullcast of the cherry orchard www.gesher-theatre.co.il.
8 We can certainly identify in Strehler's and Damiani's scenography the shift from ‘appearance’ to ‘conception’, in the high-modernist spirit of the time. See Kosuth, Joseph, ‘Art after Philosophy, I and II’, in Battcock, Gregory, ed., Idea Art (New York: Dutton, 1973), pp. 70–101Google Scholar.
9 Chekhov, Anton, The Cherry Orchard, in Anton Chekhov: Plays, tr. Fen, Elisaveta (London: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 397Google Scholar.
10 See Kellner, Douglas and O'Hara, Harry, ‘Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch’, New German Critique, 9 (1976), pp. 21–2Google Scholar.
11 In O'Hara and Kellner's words (‘Utopia and Marxism’, p. 16), ‘this three-dimensional temporality must be grasped and activated by an anticipatory consciousness that at once perceives the unrealized emancipatory potential in the past, the latencies and tendencies of the present, and the realizable hopes of the future’. (Emphasis in original, D.B.-S.)
12 Despite this visual reversal, Strehler anchors the whiteness in Chekhov's own vision, as described in his letter to Stanislavsky, consisting of a completely white garden and ladies dressed in white. Strehler quotes from this letter and refers to parallels between their outlooks (both born in the snow). See Georgio Srehler, Un Théâtre pour la vie: Reflexions, entretiens, notes de travail, tr. Emmanuelle Genevois (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 325–6.
13 Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, p. 347.
14 See Winnicott, D. W., Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971)Google Scholar; see mainly ‘The Place Where We Live’, pp. 104–10.
15 Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, p. 375.
16 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L'Oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), p. 19Google Scholar.
17 See Jameson, Fredric, ‘The Politics of Utopia’, New Left Review, 25 (2004), pp. 35–54Google Scholar.
18 The utopian model of social unity can be compounded by manifestations of local and cultural differences. In the Gesher Theater production it is clearly manifested in the cast: Liubov and Gayev are played by actors who were part of the theater's founding Russian nucleus, and veteran Russian actors also play the roles of Feers and Pishchik; the (comparatively) young characters are played by Israeli-born actors who were absorbed by the Gesher group. A reflection of changing generations, in the Israeli social context this casting also serves as a model of intercultural bridging (Gesher is the Hebrew word for bridge).