Word: lopakhin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Brook meticulously undercuts or complicates every stereotype with a welcome particularity. The crucial performance is by Film Star Brian Dennehy (Silverado, F/X) as a benevolent yet diffident Lopakhin, less a brash parvenu than a man poignantly conscious of his humble origins and clumsily trying to fit in. He is in his own way just as dreamy as Lyubov (Natasha Parry), the estate's spendthrift owner, whom he constantly upbraids for her impracticality. She ignores the impending auction of her home because any available means to "save" it would change and therefore destroy it. When Lopakhin cannot recruit...
...standard interpretation of The Cherry Orchard is, in the phrase of Critic Robert Brustein, as a "melodramatic conflict between a despoiler and $ his victims." The purported despoiler is Lopakhin, an upstart peasant turned real estate developer who plans to raze the family's mansion and orchard to create a cottage camp for vacationers. In place of this tragic vision of culture under attack, some Soviet productions have hailed Lopakhin as a visionary forerunner of the people's state. Either way, the play becomes didactic, and its undeniably comic moments work at the expense of its humanity...
This revival is marked by calculated risk that failed. All events in the play are shadowed by the auctioning off of Mme. Ranevsky's ancestral estate and its purchase by the businessman, Lopakhin. The old aristocracy is being toppled by the rising mercantile class...
Both as a directorial conception and as a casting decision, having Terence Kelly play Lopakhin is a mistake. Urbane, almost unctuous, he seems like an insurance man offering Mme. Ranevsky a real estate policy of cutting down the trees for a housing development. There should be a hush surrounding the regal presence of Mme. Ranevsky when she sweeps into a room. Carole Shelley resembles a '40s movie starlet posturing to capture a producer's eye. All this merely taps the defects in this production. Chekhov preached that the salvation of Russia lay in work. The Shaw Festival might...