The Cherry Orchard

Thinking about Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, there is one word that leaps immediately to mind: confusing.  The play has been translated from Russian and as a result there is some confusion in certain word translations.  There are footnotes left for these, but the real difficulty I found was with the actual names of the characters.  The names are so heavily Russian-based that I found it extremely difficult to follow the characters, along with the plot in general, when I first began the play.  With this in mind, I generally find that I have trouble following most plays when reading them.  I find it difficult to keep up with characters, as I tend to focus on the dialogue, so the storyline tends to get confusing and consequently lost as well.   With this difficulty in reading plays with characters whose names come easily, plays which contain characters whose names are much more unrelatable, are understandably that much more hard to comprehend.    Recognizing this from the beginning of the play, I decided to try something.  After finishing the first act, I went back and made a list of all the characters in the play.  The very short introductions included in the character list, Ranevsky: landowner, and so on, allowed me to vaguely place them with what I had already read.  As I then went on reading the acts, I continued to make small notes of the characters.  This helped greatly in keeping track of the characters and overall plot.  Once I had a better grasp on the characters and story, I actually found that I really enjoyed the play.  Although I still found many of the character’s names difficult to retain and had to continue to look at the list, I was actually able to find the humour and tragedy that I really don’t think I would have recognized had I not made the character outlines.  I think I will definitely be using this tactic when reading future plays.