Methodical Orchard

"Here was the real thing," trumpeted the Daily Telegraph. "Great -and no perhaps about it," cried the News Chronicle. Despite preshow misgivings that Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard might be axed by Lenin rather than Lopakhin, London's critics cheered last week for the famed Moscow Art Theater, in its first appearance this side of the Iron Curtain since before World War II.

Helped by a superb set of costumes and stage furnishings (including their own axes and logs, since "English ones might not have the right ring"), 15 well-disciplined M.A.T. pros, descendants of the group that "Method" Director Konstantin Stanislavsky helped to found 60 years ago, gave their Chekhov a faithfully reproduced period atmosphere. But their exuberant performance carefully nurtured the most hopeful stems in his grim orchard, and pruned out the darker growths in his vision of social decay. Trofimov, for example, a pompous dreamer in most Western versions, becomes more the fiercely earnest youth, obviously the bright hope of a Soviet future. And Gayev and Madame Ranevskaya, usually played as cultivated bumblers, appear as sober, ordinary people overtaken by cold reality.

Despite such bows to Soviet realism in the Moscow Theater's first new Orchard since 1947, the production came to London with the blessing of Chekhov's Actress-Widow Olga Knipper Chekhova. Moreover, Londoners, to whom Chekhov is as familiar as Shaw or Sheridan, seemed to approve. The first-night audiences -including such personages as Defense Minister Duncan Sandys and Lady Churchill -gave the group nine curtain calls. And one sack-clad miss added the awed, ultimate compliment: "You don't need to speak Russian to understand."

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