John Yorke looks at The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play and a landmark in 20th century theatre.

It’s 1903 and Liubov Andryeevna Ranyevskaya is returning to the family estate in southern Russia. As the head of this aristocratic household, she faces a crisis. The family is in serious financial difficulty and it seems inevitable that the estate will have to be sold to pay their debts. A local businessman, Lopakhin, offers a solution, but it would mean the loss of their beloved cherry orchard.

In this first of two episodes, the focus is on these two main protagonists, who embody the tensions between the old aristocracy and the emerging merchant class, and the student Trofimov whose revolutionary ideas point prophetically towards the path that Russia was soon to take.

John has worked in television and radio for 30 years, and shares his experience with Radio 4 listeners as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative, including many podcasts for R4.

Contributors:

Excerpt taken from the BBC Radio 3/Palimpsest production of The Cherry Orchard, directed by Toby Swift, with Neil Dudgeon as Lopakhin and Saffron Coomber as Dunyasha. It was first broadcast on Radio 3 on 18th November 2018.

Music: Torquil MacLeod

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4