The Cherry Orchard (Stoppard Translation)

by Anton Chekhov, Tom Stoppard (Translator)

Overview

Anton Chekhov was a master whose daring work revolutionized theatre. Robert Burstein declared that “there are none who bring the drama to a higher realization of its human role.” In The Cherry Orchard, his last full-length play, an impoverished landowning family is unable to face the fact that their estate is about to be auctioned off. Lopakhin, a local merchant, presents numerous options to save it, including cutting down their prized cherry orchard. But the family is stricken with denial. The Cherry Orchard charts the precipitous descent of a wealthy family and in the process creates a bold meditation on social change and bourgeois materialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802144096
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	01/06/2009
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Tom Stoppard’s plays include Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia, and Rock ’n’ Roll. In addition to The Cherry Orchard, Stoppard has adapted Chekhov’s The Seagull and Ivanov.

Editorial Reviews

A play of unbearable heartbreak-a past lost, a present bleak and a future uncertain. . . . Tom Stoppard's clear-headed adaptation is lean and to the point.
—Michael Kuchwara

Associated Press

A nimble new version by Tom Stoppard that invites fresh comic shadings, pushes that sense of the incongruous not so much into farce (although there's some of that) as into "Alice in Wonderland" absurdity. . . . People are always misspeaking in "The Cherry Orchard," stupidly and hurtfully, because no language could properly reflect a shifting social order that has yet to assume any solid form. (Mr. Stoppard's adaptation is full of classically Stoppardesque instances of eloquence gone awry.)
—Ben Brantley

The New York Times

Vibrant revival . . . lucid translation.
—Joe Dziemianowicz

Daily News