Checking off Chekhov

We borrowed the Judi Dench Collection, a 8-disc DVD set, from the library. It contains no movies, but has 9 British TV productions which first aired between 1962 and 1991. I like Dench, but the only reason I checked this out was to see a production of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. For all the literature in my background (big reader and collector since I was 10, holder of bachelor's and master's degrees in English, teacher of college English for a few years), I have neither read nor seen any Chekhov, so this seemed the perfect opportunity. The set has two different productions; I opted for the 1962 one with John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft in the lead roles--Dench, who plays the female lead in the 1981 version, has a fairly small role here. The play is billed as a comedy, but it doesn't fulfill either of the definitions of "comedy" that I am aware of: it is not funny, and it does not end with scrambled circumstances restored to normal. A well-to-do Russian family has fallen on hard times and must auction off their property, including the much-loved orchard of the title. The matriarch (Ashcroft) and her daughters return to the estate after an extended stay in Paris, and, along with her bachelor brother (Gielgud), their servants, and various neighbors and friends, spend the rest of the play feeling sorry for themselves. A couple of options are offered by outsiders but the family is too enervated to anything for themselves. In the end, they leave the locked-up house, forgetting the faithful old manservant who, when he can't open the door, just lies down and dies.

I'm sure if I were a little more conversant with Russian history of the time (the play was first produced in 1904), I might find some coherent satirical social commentary, but this production seemed slow and at times awkwardly staged for the TV cameras, and I never got fully invested in it. Gielgud (who also adapted the play from the Russian) and Ashcroft are fine, and it was great fun to see a very young (and surprisingly attractive) Ian Holm (see pic) as a student who is dating one of the daughters and is a voice of modernity--Holm might have made a good revolutionary (rather than Tom Courtenay) in Doctor Zhivago. Dench doesn't really get to make much of an impact; she looks impossibly young (under 30), but that intriguing scratch in her voice, which I assumed came with age, is there. We also watched the version of Ibsen's Ghosts from 1987, with Kenneth Branagh as Dench's syphilitic son--I like the play, but this version seemed a bit overdone, maybe because of all the TV close-ups. I usually enjoy watching taped or filmed plays on TV, but these two were not among the best I've seen. However, I can finally check Chekhov off my "need to read" or more precisely, "need to see" list.