Two homes (1)

The family home is a fundamental part of most people’s lives, so it is not surprising that both Lorca and Chekhov have placed such great emphasis on providing the audience with an insight into their characters’ homes. The significance of the homes in the plays is evident from the very beginning, as the titles of both of the family estates are also the titles of the plays, “The Cherry Orchard” and “The House of Bernarda Alba”. The home is a place which every person sees in a different light; some, like Lyuba, see it as a place to be loved, cherished and remembered “I love this house. I can’t understand my life without the Cherry Orchard.”, whereas people like Bernarda see the home as a refuge, a place to hide from the outside and a place of secrets. Whatever attitudes a person takes to their home, it is generally acknowledged to be a place of privacy for the family, somewhere that is not visible to the public. In both “The Cherry Orchard” and “The House of Bernarda Alba” all of the action takes place within the home and we are never shown anywhere other than the house or the grounds, presenting the audience with a reality that would otherwise be hidden from them, providing an interesting array of conflicting views between the characters and between the playwrights and society.

At the time of writing, both Lorca and Chekhov lived in troubled societies. Lorca’s Spain was under the rule of the fascist General Franco and was a society where traditional Catholic values were of the utmost importance and Chekhov’s Russia was undergoing a battle between traditional Russian methods and new Western ideas, as well as integrating the serfs and muzhiks into society after the Emancipation. In both of the dramas, the way that the homes are run and the problems faced within them are representative of what was going on in society at the time.

Bernarda is obsessed with gossip but at the same time wants absolute silence from her daughters and Poncia on subjects that she will hear nothing of. As soon as she hears something she doesn’t like or that is ‘unorthodox’ in her house, she will shout “Silence! Be quiet I said!” and, just like Franco, could easily adopt the name ‘the silencer’. The strict, Catholic values in society and also within the house are evident when the audience is told the story of the woman who had a child out of wedlock. The immediate response of the house’s inhabitants (apart from Adela) is that of incredulity and outrage and Bernarda says that what the woman deserves would be “a red hot coal in the place of her sin!” showing how much society opposes unorthodox and indecent behaviour, which is mirrored in the family’s attitude at finding out about Adela’s affair with Pepe El Romano “I’d have poured a river of blood on her head.”.

In “The Cherry Orchard”, the character of Lopakhin is often heard talking about how astonished he is to be in the position he is in because of his father’s social standing “Yes, my father was a muzhik and here I am in white gloves and yellow shoes.” He and the old servant Firs are the characters who regularly bring up the emancipation, showing the importance of the freeing of serfs to them. However their attitudes towards the emancipation are very different. Lopakhin is very grateful, in particular to Lyuba, for being treated as any other member of society and being given the chance of making a future for himself “You once did so much for me that I’ve forgotten everything and love you like one of my own family.” Firs, on the other hand, refers to the emancipation as the “troubles”. He, the oldest member of the household, has trouble in accepting Russia’s new ways, showing the generation divide in the house which represents the same in the world outside. The younger characters such as Lopakhin understand the new methods that Russian society is adopting, whereas characters such as Lyuba and Firs have trouble in understanding Russia’s modernisation “The muzhiks had masters and the masters had muzhiks, but now everything’s broken up, you can’t make sense of anything.” The battle between old and new Russia that was present in society at the time is reflected in the battle of the sale of the house; all of the older inhabitants want to keep it how it was and will not listen when new ideas are presented to them by Lopakhin, culminating in the eventual sale of the house to Lopakhin who immediately begins to destroy the old values of the house which could be seen as a symbolic representation of the destruction of old Russia.