The Secret Life of Plays

Peter Brook suggests that the acid test of theatre is ‘what remains’. Given that the stage is inherently ephemeral, all great plays stamp their mark on our memory in the form of iconic after-images. Agamemnon is contained in the red cloak laid down like a net to trap the returning hero; Hamlet by a man in a ruff with a skull; Woyzeck by a man bearing his dead wife into a lake; Top Girls by a girl sleepwalking in a moonlit kitchen. How these images come to exceed their narrative brief and become saturated in meaning is more elusive. After all, every passing moment in a play potentially yields an image or symbol; but were every moment to do so, a play would grind to a halt. How plays secrete apposite symbols at moments of pressure is what this chapter concerns itself with.

Theatre inhabits a much sparer visual or sensory field than other dramatic forms (excluding radio) through its sheer selectivity. This is largely because of the economy and constraint the stage imposes. Plays therefore work through synecdoche, offering parts that stand for wholes – a room for a house, a tree for a wood, a family for a nation. For every object or person or place specified onstage, we sense the presence of those not there; every onstage suggests an offstage and the limitations of the form place symbolic weight onto everything populating the stage. A playwright’s symbolic sense is less about creating symbols and more about controlling them. A playwright’s power to evoke more than what is shown, most explicitly in their stage directions, but also in their deeper suggestive powers, enables the play’s dialogue and action to create resonance beyond function. This resonance might be amplified by the work of the designer and director, but it is rooted in the primary suggestive force of the drama itself.

Theatre is an object lesson in the manner the Italian educator Pestalozzi envisaged – it communicates ideas through sensory experience that works on the ear and the eye to reach the brain. The sources of the playwright’s sense-repertoire might appear limited in comparison to a film, but these limits make what gets into the play all the more expressive. After all, nothing on the stage is simply itself. As Caryl Churchill’s short play This is a Chair shows, a simple prop is loaded with meaning: a chair is a throne, a ducking stool and a restraining device all at once. The interaction of character with set or property or costume, the interaction of physical action with spoken word, the interaction of theatrical elements (sound, light) with all of the above as specified in the stage direction, enable an image to gather associations – associations that move such elements beyond the functional into the expressive.

Clearly, different types of play capitalise on this tendency towards metaphor and symbol, to a greater or lesser extent. Lorca’s Blood Wedding, for instance, marries a spare aesthetic of pared-back dialogue and unspecified locales with an explicit dictation of the stage image. His spaces in the final act are given a kind of colour coding, as in the closing scene: ‘White room. Two girls in blue, winding skein of red wool.’ The action of the scene seems motivated by the image of red wool spilling across a white space: the lovers are captured in the heat of their elopement and killed. Also in the final act, Lorca introduces the Moon into the play: ‘Enter the Moon – a young woodcutter with a white face. Intense blue light.’ This necessitates a stylisation of costume, design and performance, reducing the actor’s body to a hieroglyph in the manner called for by French director Antonin Artaud. These portents and the colouration of the action are mirrored in the heightened dialogue, full of proverbs and reiterated images of wells, horses and blood, accompanied by duende songs, serving to inflect each moment with archetypal import. Lorca’s poetics offer a bold realisation of his contemporary Jean Cocteau’s plea for ‘poetry of the theatre’ rather than ‘poetry in the theatre’. He also reveals the two contradictory movements by which that suggestive poetic is achieved – through abstraction (removing particularising detail that limits and literalises) and prescription (the reiteration of verbal and visual images in counterpoint, the drawing on myth and song).

These techniques are emulated to very different effect in Sarah Kane’s most suggestive play Cleansed, notably in the coloured yet abstract spaces: ‘The White Room’, ‘The Red Room’, ‘The Round Room’. Here, resonance emerges through the tough juxtaposition of cruel yet non-naturalistic actions, with scenes often reduced to images and dialogue flattened into colourless simplicity. In fact, in the economy of the play, that richness of the visual and aural realm necessitates this demotion of language’s role. This is evident in Scene Thirteen with its captive lovers, Carl and Rod. The scene begins with Rod musing over the savagery of the all-powerful Tinker. Then dialogue gives way to song and dance, as a child sings Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Things We Said Today’:

The singing stops.

Then begins again.

CARL stands, wobbly.

He begins to dance – a dance of love for ROD.

The dance becomes frenzied, frantic, and CARL makes grunting noises, mingling with the child’s singing. [...]

TINKER is watching.

He forces CARL to the ground and cuts off his feet.

As in Lorca, the action is sensorily precise; what makes it suggestive is precisely the removal of words and therefore voiced intentions. It has an implacable quality, flouting rational explication. Likewise, the play offers an answering, visionary set of images which defy realisation, as in Scene Ten, when, after Grace has been horribly violated, ‘Out of the ground grow daffodils. They burst upward, their yellow covering the entire stage.’ Daffodils, not lilacs – suggestive of spring, renewal, indelibly romantic in association. There is, as is often the case with the theatre of symbolism, a nod to earlier traditions of sacred drama. In relinquishing dialogue for image, Kane both hands over power to the production (in the sense that Carl’s dance could take a myriad of different forms) and at the same time constrains it (the mise-en-scène and action is meticulously mapped out).

There are dangers in this aesthetic. Behind Lorca and Kane’s approach lies a philosophy of dramatic form made particularly explicit in the late nineteenth century and deriving from French poetry and literature. For poets such as Baudelaire or Mallarmé, and playwrights such as Wilde, the symbol was not merely a device, it was the imperative behind the work, serving to obscure overt meaning and reveal the world as a deceptive brocade concealing the spiritual truth. The epitome of this approach in playwriting terms is Wilde’s Salome, a kind of total theatre where all the dramatic elements are choreographed to create a suggestive sensorium, and which also famously climaxes in a dance, that of the Seven Veils. Wilde’s hopes for its London debut are revealed in his correspondence with artist Charles Ricketts: ‘A violet sky and in place of an orchestra, braziers of perfume... a new perfume for every emotion.’ Leaving aside this unrealised aspiration for olfactory effects, Salome as a play is pregnant with images of moons, blood and darkness; but in contrast to the stripped-back worlds of Lorca and Kane, Wilde’s action proceeds funereally, as if the play existed only to give rise to the symbols within it. Through language and image, Wilde forges a sequence of tableaux vivants influenced by the visual arts, especially Gustave Moreau’s paintings: Jokanaan (John the Baptist) in the cistern, Salome’s dance, Salome kissing the severed head of the prophet, Salome being crushed by Herod’s soldiers. Salome is an extraordinary play, and can work effectively onstage, as Steven Berkoff’s astonishing 1990 production revealed; but, unlike in Blood Wedding or Cleansed, the balance between symbol and action, between specification and open-endedness, is awry – all power has been granted to the symbol at the expense of the life of the play.

Such explicitly poetic plays put symbolism before everything else. However, all great plays generate moments that seem to exceed their function and become a summation of the wider action. And generally these moments occur at the ends of acts or of the play itself:

Old Times – Deeley with his head in Kate’s lap, Anna standing with her back to us.

In these end images, the meaning of the preceding action is concentrated into a sort of diagram. The isolated Firs embodies what the occupants of Ranevskaya’s household have lost and the fate of the world they derive from; the image also epitomises the lethal consequences of their vague, romanticised world view. Harold Pinter’s image reworks the tableau that begins the play, of Deeley slumped on the sofa, Kate curled up on the chair, Anna standing looking in. The intervening action may have expelled Anna from their life, but it’s also made explicit Kate’s enigmatic power and Deeley’s abject dependence. And Anna has not exited; the three remain, condemned to be with each other. The image of Susan in Plenty, given it is a retrospective one, enacts the enduring hold the past exerts on her bleak present and gives that past pre-eminence. As to Edmond, his quest has ended in a kind of thwarted romance, where he learns to love what he feared; the cell itself seems to embody his insight that ‘Our life is a schoolhouse, and we’re dead.’

Hamlet reveals how this process works throughout the play, as each act flashes up its own iconic image as a sort of landmark. Here is a selective account:

Such images suggest stasis, suspensions in the narrative movement – and they do all have a show-stopping quality. The Ghost after all walks in silence and is mute, and demands that we read him symbolically. Again, with the Player King, an image of stasis from an earlier tale, the moment before Pyrrhus slays Priam, is performed, apparently without immediate purpose within the scene. The Player King even has a startling break in the iambic pentameter to emphasise the stillness of this moment:

So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,

And like a neutral to his will and matter,

Did nothing.

But as we often see against some storm...

The image of Hamlet contemplating murder but not executing it, poised over Claudius’s supplicant form, is rich in irony and consequently memorable. Likewise, Ophelia’s excruciating performance to the spellbound Court, sliding in and out of song, and accompanied by the distribution of flowers and herbs, again arrests the action. Hamlet’s happening upon the skull of Yorick in the graveyard, whilst hardly pertinent to the immediate narrative, has come to embody the meditative, morbid strangeness of the whole play.

Such images derive from earlier forms of theatre – the dumbshow (explicitly present in the performance in Act Three) and the tableau. They arise from moments that transcend the flow of narrative, assembling the inner meaning of the action into a picture that stands out in relief. This pictorial idea is dangerous – rather like a high-concept design, it might impose on the play portentous images that weigh down on the organic motion of the action. Yet the plays above are all subtly structured by these landmark moments that are more than the sum of their parts, and which gather the immanent meaning of the whole into something ambivalent and memorable.

Take the image of Firs, captive, at the end of The Cherry Orchard. We have been prepared for his presence throughout the act, with most of the household seeking him out so he can be taken to the station. In previous acts he has steadily been established as the family’s link to the lost world of serfdom and the days when the estate was sustainable, as well as the shared childhoods of Ranevskaya and her brother. Placing a minor character at the close of the play might appear a sort of afterthought, as if he were forgotten luggage. Yet with all the invocations of ‘new life’ in Act Four, the residual presence of an elderly retainer in a seemingly deserted house (indeed in the ‘room once known as the nursery’) acquires a number of resonances. Gradually a piece of narrative information suggests a different level of meaning in the play.

Firs, as elusive in the previous moments as a lost pair of galoshes, acquires the status of an object; left behind when all the actors have departed, and speaking to himself but also the audience, he enters a moment out of the narrative as well as one arising from it, and becomes emblematic. The deserted Firs forms an image that reflects back on the play before, as well as out into the world beyond it, because of the values placed on him within the narrative and by the other characters. The image grows out of the action, belonging to it but also functioning metaphorically beyond it in the following ways:

Contrast – For much of the play Firs is seen only in the presence of groups and in the wake of his master Gaev; Firs on his own is unexpected.

Echo – The play begins with two people waiting in this room for the return of the family and ends with one left behind by them; these framing images, through resemblance and difference, acquire a denser degree of meaning.

Position – In the syntax of the play the last image is the lingering one; configurings at the ends of acts and plays function as a kind of after-image on the retina.

Inversion – The image is full of inner paradoxes; Firs is a servant without a master, one who cares for others abandoned by those he cares for, the representative of continuity representing the end of continuity.

Whilst some images clearly initiate a play’s action, others may be its destination and final expression, for an image in effect expresses an idea made concrete and out of time. Cleopatra dead with an asp on her breast, Solness falling from his own building, Faustus imploring time to cease – all are images made inevitable by the inner moral and intellectual workings of the narrative that preceded them, and which they cap and express.

The steady building and preparation of a symbol to prime it with resonance beyond itself is part of the narrative work of the play. Forcing the pace of symbols can make them appear flimsy and forced; in the end the images that endure are organic ones, which arise ineluctably from the story being told. This is evident in the imagery in Robert Holman’s plays, steadily fashioned out of the substance of closely observed reality. Take his 1988 play Across Oka, which concerns itself with relationships between seemingly antithetical social systems (USSR and England), between generations (Matty and his grandparents, Eileen and Jolyon), and between environments (Yorkshire and Siberia). The play – which at points seems to disavow narrative movement altogether for patiently mapped private grief – in fact goes about quietly constructing its central organic image, namely the fate of the eggs of a rare Siberian crane. The play opens with Jolyon explaining how a Russian friend bequeathed him two eggs he longs to take to Siberia, a desire frustrated by his unhappy marriage with Eileen; and it concludes with his grandson, Matty, on an expedition with the son of a Siberian scientist to place the eggs in a crane’s nest and thereby reverse its imminent extinction.

The eggs are embedded in the narrative from the outset. Nikolai, the son of the scientist, awaits their arrival with barely concealed passion. He and Matty learn to tend and maintain them under scientist Pavel’s tutelage, and the level of care required is meticulously established, the eggs having to be turned, kept in an incubator, handled with intricate care. In advance of the story few audience members would ascribe value to the eggs, but the action incrementally endows them with heft and weight – they stand for the nervous bond between the boys, representative of two highly polarised cultures, for the tentative and lost thread of affinity in the past between the dead grandfather and his living descendants, and for the future of the confused Matty. Of course, as eggs in themselves they carry associations with birth, transformation and change. So when the final scene pares all other elements away to observe the boys deep in the reserve at Oka, their conflict expressed through the eggs, the tension generated by their fate becomes unbearable:

MATTY has the egg in his hand.

NIKOLAI. Matty, what else can I do?

MATTY. Just shake my hand.

A slight pause.

NIKOLAI shakes his head.

NIKOLAI. No, you are a very naughty boy.

MATTY picks up the second Siberian crane egg from the incubator. He presses his fingers around them.

MATTY. I’ll break them.

NIKOLAI. No, Matty, you would not do that.

MATTY. I would.

NIKOLAI. Matty, you are a nice boy really.

MATTY hits the two eggs together. The shells crack. The eggs break. The embryos come out into his hands.

Silence.

Such tension would be inconceivable, were this to be the play’s first scene. Holman, however, has carefully inducted us into the meaning of this act of vandalism and self-loathing. This moment then feels like the play’s destination and its unmistakable power derives from the fact that whilst it feels unpremeditated it is in fact the inevitable working out of all the events that precede it.

Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme is explicitly concerned with the malevolent power of symbols to fix and paralyse a culture into fatal inertia. Pyper, its protagonist, a veteran of the Somme where his fellow Ulstermen were slaughtered, opens the play by conjuring up his companions going over the top into battle:

Silence. As the light increases, PYPER sees the ghosts appear, CRAIG, ROULSTON and CRAWFORD.

The dead have become fixed monuments in his memory – but the play dissects Pyper’s misremembered past, which in its ossified form has condemned Ulster to decades of conflict. To achieve this revisionism, McGuinness confronts the baleful symbols that bedevil Northern Ireland. The red hand, an image of Ulster ascendancy, finds itself reiterated throughout the play, but the most striking account of the malign effect of symbols is evident in the extended scene, ‘Pairing’. Here the play’s four character duets all find themselves battling against one icon or another within the Ulster landscape: Craig and Pyper ponder a pagan remain on Lough Erne, Crawford and Roulston skirmish in a Protestant church, Moore and Millen attempt to cross a rope bridge, and McIlwaine and Anderson drag a Lambeg drum through a field. The stage is divided into symbolic spaces, a constellation of broken images suggestive of ‘Ulster’: religious, atavistic, ceremonial and physical. The burden of hauling the great Lambeg drum is particularly potent as McIlwaine kicks and beats it in frustrated rage, invoking an image of a nation flattened by its own mythology. The two men attempt to stage their own Orange March, but the symbol, wrenched out of context, is pitifully unsatisfying:

MCILWAINE. [...] It’s no good here on your own. No good without the speakers. No good without the bands, no good without the banners. Without the chaps. No good on your own. Why did we come here to be jeered at? Why did we come here, Anderson?

ANDERSON. To beat a drum.

McGuinness’s harrowing play reveals how stage images can detoxify and re-humanise symbols that have become deadly clichés. In effect he activates them as a principle of narrative itself: each section of the play is motivated by a thorough deconstruction of Ulster’s myths embodied in icons – the blood sacrifice of the Somme itself, the battle of the Boyne which the men re-enact before going to their own death, the very landscape of Northern Ireland, reduced as it is in the scene above to four poignant fragments that exacerbate the men’s pain and confirm their fate.

A symbol’s primary practical function is to intensify or condense the scattered and elusive meanings of the play. When in ordinary life we talk of something having ‘symbolic value’ we usually want to suggest it has a meaning beyond its price tag; in a sense we are suggesting it carries associative weight, mnemonic and ‘sentimental’ meaning. This same implication extends to symbolic things in plays.

Consider the ubiquity of symbols in late-nineteenth-century plays, many of which are signposted in the very title of the texts. The Wild Duck, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard all fling the symbol into the audience’s lap, and for contemporary audiences such overtness can feel crude. Yet as a tool of characterisation alone, these symbols earn their keep in the play. Chekhov’s eponymous cherry orchard serves as a map against which his characters define and differentiate themselves, thereby condensing and expressing with great economy the wider meanings of the play:

The unseen dimension of the orchard (like the attic room with its wounded wild duck in Ibsen’s play) deepens its expressive powers. Chekhov refined his capacity to pull this off, from the often embarrassing crudeness with which the seagull is invoked and even at one point brandished. Ibsen, too, found more active ways of combining the symbolic realm with the physical, naturalist one.

There are a number of ways in which these transactions between the seen and the unseen might work:

The space beyond the stage and how it is glimpsed is always critical to the potency of what’s onstage, from the Nightwatchman hailing the offstage beacons indicating Agamemnon’s homecoming, to Hamm peering gloomily out of the windows of the undesignated space of Beckett’s Endgame at what appears to be a devastated wasteland. A window or door evokes the beyond, be it a hostile space, a space that can only be yearned for, a transcendent space or a constant threat. They are the most charged points of any set as they imply choices. The reason that Nora’s slamming of the door resonates so profoundly in A Doll’s House is because that door has been the very embodiment of the limits of her world. The door that keeps admitting radically different stories and realities in Caryl Churchill’s brilliant short play Heart’s Desire embodies this idea. In farces from Feydeau to Terry Johnson, the door is the locus of anxiety and revelation – in a sense, all the action pivots on the relationship between the exterior door and the door to a cupboard or a garden.

Robert Holman’s eggs have been noted, but all plays have their significant properties that make visible and felt the unseen elements of interpersonal relationships. These ‘props’ rarely bring inherent value with them but, like money, acquire it from their differing functions in the hands of different characters: Desdemona’s handkerchief in Othello is a keepsake which bespeaks intimacy, but in its very insubstantiality reveals the fragility of reputation in the world of the play, all the more potent given the absence of other specified objects. Characters are often embodied in such objects – think of the ominous trace of General Gabler apparent in his guns, which defeminise his daughter Hedda and impugn Tesman’s masculinity. Marlene’s gift of a dress to Angie in Top Girls gets caught in a rip tide of symbolic meaning concerning clothing that stretches back within the play to Lady Nijo’s language of gowns in Act One, and gives weight to Angie’s apparent resolve to kill her mother; but it also makes Marlene present in her absence and reveals the ill fit between her world and Angie’s as the dress estranges the girl from her context, making her look foolish and incongruous.

Sound is perhaps the most potent of all forms of theatrical symbolism. Its immersive, associative workings conjure up acoustic images of the unseen in the audience’s imagination. Some sound comes of course with its own semantic freight – cock crows suggest time, space and milieu, as does the intoning of Big Ben, or the whine of a police siren. Yet sound can play a more ambivalent role. One of the most telling sound effects specified in a contemporary play is the tinkle of a slot machine that accompanies Mark’s sexual transaction with rent-boy Gary in Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking – on one level this unwarranted specific direction in a play otherwise notable for its lack of scenic specification is crude in its denotation: this is a world reduced to the cash nexus. Yet the poignancy of the sound, set against the ambiguous exchange we see onstage, makes it more haunting, less satiric in function. The notoriously open-ended sound effect of a broken string (‘dying away, sad’) that comes towards the end of Act Two of The Cherry Orchard is explained away by the characters as possibly the sound of a breaking mineshaft cable, or a heron’s cry; but in itself it defies definition, largely because it has no clear narrative function.

In a sense, this returns us to a kind of spatial thinking. When thinking about the set as a symbolic component in itself, the capacity of environments to bear their own allegorical, expressive power beyond story is apparent. Take Arthur Miller’s All My Sons: here, the backyard of Joe Keller’s house is less self-consciously located in the land of symbols than, say, Willy Loman’s house in Death of a Salesman. Yet the picket fence, the porch and the evoked neighbourhood feel as if they have been drawn directly from an active Hollywood iconography that would have connected instantly with audiences of the day; that even now take us back to that eternal Capra-land that persists as an emblem of suburban USA (variously reworked by David Lynch and Sam Mendes). Thus Miller’s garden works intertextually. But it is the broken tree, a kind of catalyst for the story but also a blatant portent, that tells us that ‘something is wrong with this picture’. The iconic American house takes variant forms: the southern manse of Tennessee Williams definitively explored in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where it is slyly satirised by the vast bed that occupies it, a monument to the sterility of Brick and Maggie’s relationship; the suburban house in August Wilson’s Fences, which relocates Miller’s domicile across the tracks to an underprivileged Afro-American world where even picket fences are not viable; the gothic pile in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, freed of Williams’s patriarch, rendering it a matriarchal remnant of hypocrisies and dormant rituals. All these houses function dramatically but also take part in a symbolic conversation within and beyond the theatre. The symbolic resonance of the mise-en-scène is confirmed by the fact that whole theatrical movements are designated by it, whether ‘kitchen-sink realism’ or the ‘French window plays’ despised by Kenneth Tynan.

Pace Brecht – who wanted his stage constantly ablaze in white light and thus rid of atmosphere – light before it gets anywhere near a lighting board is another eloquent part of the writer’s symbolic repertoire. Beckett so often makes light function overtly as part of his stage language – even, as in Play, as a protagonist interrogating the figures in the urn. Largely, playwrights work with implicit light, arising from the temporal movements of the action. The real-time descent into night in the closing act of Top Girls is a classic example of this: there’s no stage direction to indicate that Joyce’s departure at the end of the act will plunge the kitchen into darkness, setting us up for the spooky re-entry of Angie, but it is implied in the scene, as is the movement from ‘evening’ indicated at the opening of the scene to night (e.g. Angie going to bed, Marlene reflecting on the fact that it’s too late to go for a walk to the estuary). The long fade of the day is written in and helps symbolically nudge us and the sisters into a darker place of more irreversible confrontation. Ibsen invokes light’s power in a masterly fashion: The Wild Duck moves from a lighting state depicting hospitality (‘brilliantly lit lamps and candelabra’), to the single lamp of Ekdal’s humble studio in Act Two, to the hopeful daylight streaming in from a skylight in the same room in Act Three, the sun setting in Act Four, and finally the ‘cold, grey morning light’ of Act Five – those lighting states carry the whole emotional journey of the play in sensuous, symbolic form. Conor McPherson’s Shining City, too, in its transit of a day in a suburban counsellor’s office, tracks the movement of light through the room to evoke its mercurial state, indicative of the disordered life of its inhabitant.

Godot is the extreme exemplar of this, and the huge weight of meaning attached to his absence is a testament to the potency of referring to but not representing someone onstage. The offstage character is invariably powerful – whether it’s the invoked but unseen sales firms alluded to in Glengarry Glen Ross, the men banished from Top Girls, the unseen guests in The Chairs, figures such as Mac or the long-deceased Jessie who populate the imagination in The Homecoming – as to be absent yet always spoken of suggests a determining presence in the action earned without any effort. In the more profligate theatre of the Renaissance, perhaps this role is most clearly occupied by ghosts – Hamlet’s father is ever present even if not shown, just as Banquo in his death is surely more potent than in life. After all, why are these characters not there? Because they are dead, in which case their legacy is still binding the characters in their absence; because they have withdrawn (think of Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the Count in Miss Julie), with the constant threat that they may return; because they exist inside the characters more than in actuality (the son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Chairs, the intended target in The Dumb Waiter).

This list merely itemises the many ways in which theatre creates meaning almost by default. Symbols, then, like theatre itself, serve to condense what is elusive, to make manifest what is elliptical, to suggest more than their literal meaning – they are a litmus test of the achievement of true dramatisation, for they reveal the play working through indirect rather than overt modes of expression. The more condensed the world and action of the play, the more it exists on the level of the symbol, functioning metaphorically – but if it is only located on the plane of the metaphoric, it risks breaking loose from the audience’s reality altogether.

LOPAKHIN		Commercial opportunity: ‘If you break up the cherry orchard and the land along by the river into building lots, then rent them out for summer cottages, you’ll have an income of least twenty-five thousand a year.’
RANEVSKAYA /GAEV		Childhood and aesthetic meanings: ‘Oh, my dearest darling, wonderful cherry orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness, goodbye!’
FIRS		Practical source of cherries for preserves: ‘Yes they’d send the dried cherries, cartloads of ’em, to Moscow and Kharkov...’
TROFIMOV /ANYA		Evidence of waste and memory of serfdom: ‘And can’t you see, looking out at you from every tree trunk in that orchard, every leaf, every trunk, those human beings?’

Chapter Seven

Dynamic Symbols: The Art of Suggestion