byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

zforzelma asked: Hi! More Cherry Orchard.
It's true that Lopakhin never explicitly says that he loves Varya, but the question of whether he does or not then becomes the actor's job to answer. I could just leave it at that and say that it's therefore not even worth discussing in a literary analysis of the play but really I think that viewing it from an actor's perspective can help.
The major question you have to consider when looking at it this way is: which choice will make for a more interesting performance?
I *certainly* agree that playing Lopakhin like he's in love with her, but too clumsy to propose would be a lazy and uninteresting performance to watch.
I also think that the opposite extreme would be equally repellent - that he's merely playing with her emotions as a representative of the upper class that oppressed him as a child.
well, maybe not equally repellent, this would be a little more interesting than the first one in performance. However, to quote you this also "doesn’t really do justice to the depth and layers with which Chekhov works."
His characters are amazingly multi-layered and wonderfully human. That's why I think the strongest (but not the only) answer lies not out on the neat ironed edges, but jumbled up in the middle.
He loves her, but she represents something repellant to him. He doesn't want to hurt her, but loves to watch her squirm. He wants to marry her, but he doesn't want to be tied forever to this family that has always help him in its power.
*That* would be an interesting way to play it. Love, but too much other crap in the way to let it flourish. They're representatives of different eras in Russia's history. Lopakhin knows this. But there's no conflict if he doesn't love her.
~Lilac

Precisely. And I’m all for actors and directors answering dramatic questions - not critics. Critics are good for autopsies. 

The production I was talking about chose to answer these questions by removing Lopakhin’s presumed love for Varya, presenting it as something that other characters discuss and assume but that is actually not there. They played it as a classic set-up situation, you know, a blind date type thing - your friends think you and this guy would be great together so why don’t you go out sometime, then you fall for the guy, and he doesn’t, but he has to keep pretending because it’s gone too far. Horribly painful for Varya, but acceptable for the most cynical and business-like sides of Lopakhin.

They then chose to work with some other questions regarding Lopakhin and Ranevskaya, which brought out this terrific subtext about his possible love for her rather than Varya- and their scenes were played very much to this tune, underpinned by his inability to confess to her (this woman he loathes and adores at the same time) that he loves her.

I’m totally intrigued by the potential sadism you see in Lopakhin - it puts the Hamlet quotation in a very interesting light. 

Are you an actor yourself? Thank you so much for your point of view, I’ve really enjoyed thinking about this. Heck, it’s making me want to go back to directing.

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?