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RUSSIAN playwright Anton Chekhov’s famous play "The Cherry Orchard" will now have a Kashmir setting. Theatre artiste-director Mushtaq Kak is working on a bilingual adaptation of the play and will touch issues like migration, cherry orchards and train services.
"I am not changing the original script. I am just trying to adapt it by bringing in some relevant elements of my state (Jammu and Kashmir)," says the director. Chekhov’s "The Cherry Orchard" is about a rich Russian woman Lovey and her family and their return to the ancestral estate, which includes a big cherry orchard just before it is auctioned to pay the mortgage. "Just like the original, my adaptation will see the return of a Kashmiri migrant family to their home as they find new things like train services but less of cherry orchards as they had to be cut to lay the rail lines," adds Kak, who was the artistic director at the Sri Ram Centre in New Delhi. "It is an inter-cultural approach. It is about one’s contemporary roots," says the director. He says he will use Kashmiri costumes in the play. According to Kak, most directors like Chekhov’s plays because their themes are quite contemporary and they have an emotional element attached to them. Besides "The Cherry Orchard", Kak has also directed other Chekhov’s plays like "The Seagull" and "Chekhov In My Life", which is based on Lydia Avilov’s autobiographical account of the writer. "In "Chekhov In My Life" I try to explore the romantic angle of Chekhov and Lydia. The play is about Lydia’s 10-year relationship with Chekhov," he says. Chekhov was born in Taganrog on January 29, 1860. Son of a grocer (and grandson of a serf), he joined the Moscow Medical School and became a doctor. While practising medicine, he developed a great passion for writing. Later, he began writing
full-time. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis on July 15, 1904, in
Germany. — PTI
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