Which playwright wrote The Cherry Orchard?

Chekhov, and he and his director spent the rehearsals arguing about what kind of play it was. Chekhov called it a comedy, in places a farce; Stanislavsky staged it as a tragedy about the loss of an estate and made the audience weep. Chekhov was furious and said Stanislavsky had ruined it. The argument has never been settled and productions still choose sides.

He was a doctor throughout, treating patients for free, and said medicine was his lawful wife and literature his mistress. He also travelled across Siberia by cart in 1890 to survey the penal colony on Sakhalin, conducting a census of thousands of convicts single-handed and publishing a study that contributed to prison reform - which is an unusual detour for a playwright with tuberculosis.

The rule named after him is the one every writing course quotes: if a gun is on the wall in the first act it must be fired by the third. His own late plays largely ignore it. The Cherry Orchard is full of things that do not pay off, conversations that miss each other, and a sound nobody can identify - and the modern theatre's habit of leaving things unresolved comes substantially from him. He died at 44, in a German spa town, having asked for champagne.