Sakura — After Chekhov “relates to a group of people who feel like they’re about to lose everything,” says director Eda Holmes, though “there’s no Quebec politics in it.”
The theme of the new Centaur Theatre season is Coming Home to Centaur, so it’s only fitting that it kicks off Tuesday with Sakura — After Chekhov, a reimagining of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s 1903 play The Cherry Orchard, adapted by veteran Montreal actor-playwright Harry Standjofski and set in contemporary Quebec.
Eda Holmes, who is artistic director of Centaur and director of the play, said in a recent interview at the Old Montreal theatre that they came up with the “coming home” catchphrase to underline their wish to be as Montreal as possible this season.
“We’ve called it Coming Home to Centaur because all of the plays I’ve chosen for the season deal with family heritage and art, and how those things impact our lives,” said Holmes. “This one is really the linchpin for that.”
The second play of the season will be the Montreal première of the Toronto hit Three Women of Swatow (Nov. 5 to 24), Chloé Hung’s look at the family ties of three Chinese-Canadian women, helmed by Montreal-based director Sophie Gee. Then from Jan. 21 to Feb. 9, Centaur presents Strawberries in January — A Musical Fantasy, a musical adaptation of Montreal writer Évelyne de la Chenelière’s well-known play. The season concludes with a new take on Michel Tremblay’s classic play For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (May 13 to June 1), which was a big success at Centaur in 1998. It has a bicultural cast anchored by Ellen David and Emmanuel Schwartz.
That last show will officially reopen the larger room at Centaur, which has been under renovation for the past year.
Sakura — After Chekhov (which continues through Oct. 6) revamps the original plot — about a Russian landowner who has to sell her land to pay the mortgage — and updates it to somewhere in Quebec, likely around Gaspé according to Standjofski, with an anglo family that has to sell their country estate because they can’t afford the tax bill. Torquil Campbell — the Stars frontman, who wrote the music for the play — said the plot is not too far from his own family’s experience with their house in North Hatley in the Eastern Townships.
“(Standjofski has) used the template of Chekhov to talk about what we’re all afraid of now, as people, as anglophones in Quebec, in the world of climate change — all of those things,” said Holmes. “It’s very funny, but it’s very, very moving, and I feel it’s also very true. That’s what attracted me to it. This is everything I think about and worry about in my life.”
So it’s about anglophones in Quebec?
“It relates to a group of people who feel like they’re about to lose everything,” answered Holmes. “There’s no Quebec politics in it. It’s a blue-blood family that’s had the property for a few generations. The grandmother dies and she hadn’t paid taxes for seven years, so now they have a tax bill they can’t afford.”
Campbell, who was sitting with Holmes, jumped in: “My house. My family. The whole subject of some of the songs on the last Stars record (From Capelton Hill) were about North Hatley and this crumbling ruin of a summer house we have that is my favourite place in the world and that we are still trying to hold on to. So far, so good. But every year someone says, ‘We have to sell this place’ and it’s a hot-button issue. We are unable to have an unemotional conversation about it.”
Campbell said he likes that this show feels true to Chekhov.
“I’ve seen a lot of Chekhov adaptations and I often say, ‘That doesn’t even remotely resemble what Chekhov was supposed to be expressing,’” he said. “And this is really Chekhovian. Chekhov was writing comedies about people who had a few days together to decide what to do.”
In a separate phone conversation, Standjofski admitted he’s kind of obsessed with Chekhov. He said audiences sometimes have difficulty relating to Chekhov because of the social situations depicted and “the somewhat fusty language of some of the early translations.” That’s why he thought it would be a good idea to set The Cherry Orchard in Quebec today.
It takes place in one of those towns in rural Quebec that used to be dominated by well-to-do anglo families.
“It’s a family that, like a lot of families today, is fractured — even more fractured than the original one,” said Standjofski. “They’re all over the place; they’re scattered. The matriarch has passed away and there’s a very large piece of land, one kilometre on a shoreline. It’s hinted at that it’s on the St. Lawrence. It’s old money and when you think of old money in Quebec, you think of old English money. You don’t think of French money. That’s been a more recent development.
“There’s this big piece of land and there’s a financial issue and now they have to get rid of it. They’ve all come back, not knowing they’re going to have to deal with this in such a pressing way.”