The Cherry Orchard Cherry Orchard" was Chekhov's tribute to himself. Many of the characters in the play hearken back to his earlier works and are based on people he knew in his own life. It should also be noted that his boyhood house was bought and torn down by a wealthy man that his mother had considered a friend. The breaking guitar string in acts 2 and 4 hark back to his earliest works. Finally the classic "loaded gun" that appears in many of Chekhov's plays appears here, but this is his only play in which a gun is shown but not fired.
The Three Weird Sisters Gertrude (Price), Maude (Clare) and Isobel (Merrall) live in a decaying and claustrophobic mansion in a Welsh mining village. Gertrude is blind, Maude is almost deaf and Isobel is crippled by arthritis. The coalmine out of which the family made their fortune is almost worked out, and its tunnels and shafts are dangerously unstable. When a section of the underground workings collapses, destroying a row of local cottages and unsettling the foundations of the mansion, the sisters feel honour-bound to finance repairs, but do not have the means to do so. The sisters' younger half-brother Owen (Lovell), who left the