polvosederia asked: hey lopakhin loves varya, not ranevskaya, he only remembered that she was kind with him or it was first love.
Subtext. Subtext. Subtext.
My point is that it may not be said explicitly, but subtextually it is all there; many productions play it that way (including the one I wrote about). If you think of it, it makes a lot of sense. He is torn between the past and the future just as much as every other character in the play: the memory of his fondness for Ranyevskaya as a child/young man, and his desire to disenfranchise himself from any kind of bond to her, her family and her estate.
The actor playing him in this production was almost the same age as Ranyevskaya, something which for me strengthened the sense that he had been desperately in love with her (or with an embellished, idealised memory of her) for a long, long time.
Besides, nothing in the play (at least in the English language translations of it with which I am familiar) indicates that he is indeed in love with Varya, only that everybody is pushing him to propose to her (who, on the other hand, clearly loves him). Do you have any evidence to the contrary in the original script?
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