Bloomed Cherry Tree Garden
(Vest, 06.10.2003) - Director Aleksandar Popovski made Chekhov’s “Cherry Tree Garden” bloom and presented it in its full glow in the production of Beogradsko Narodno Pozoriste which performed the play within the Youth Open Theatre (MOT) on Saturday evening. Popovski gave new reading to the classical work about an impoverished noble family in Russia whose estate is sold in an auction. The family which can save itself from bankruptcy by selling a valuable cherry tree garden rejects giving up that family symbol with passionate fatalism. A newly enriched son of their former servant will buy the estate and will vow to cut down the cult cherry tree garden in order that he can expel his own demons from the family memory.
Popovski reinvents a classical text and touches only marginally that grief and fatalism that are only typical for Chekhov’s characters and relations between them. What he puts an accent on is how to overcome that everlasting struggle between past and future, how to ensure that past does not rein and kill future. “A new life is starting,” resounds a thought of a character in the end of the play and this is the key of this Chekhov’s play - the catharsis is optimism. Fragile, uncertain but still optimism.
His “Cherry Tree Garden” is a coherently minimalist work where an equal character is the production design (stage design and costumes by Angelina Atlagic) and as rarely when in theatre - music. The music light motif is the now already classical theme “Earth” of the Yu-rock legendary group, Ekaterina Velika.
The composer Kiril Dzajkovski interprets Earth through variations based on tango, and is in great measure credited for the strong emotional charge and warmth of the play.
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