Theatre review: The Cherry Orchard

The Donald and Margot Warehouse is back in its occasional in-the-round configuration for Benedict Andrews' version of The Cherry Orchard, with Magda Willi covering the stage and walls in heavily-patterned orange carpet, signalling from the start a different aesthetic for Chekhov's final play, and the one widely interpreted as anticipating the Russian Revolution. The formerly wealthy family hurtling towards a doom they refuse to see coming have owned a large estate for generations, but are now seriously in debt: Gaev (Michael Gould) has been in charge of managing the estate, which he's done good-naturedly but ineptly; his sister Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss) on the other hand seems to actively haemorrhage money, whether through her attraction to dodgy men who invariably rip her off, or through genuinely seeming not to understand the value of the cash she spends or gives away.

Ranevskaya is back in Russia for the first time in five years because the land is about to go up for auction. But first Lopakhin (Adeel Akhtar,) descendant of serfs who once worked the land and now a successful businessman, has a plan that could let them keep their family's legacy.

It involves the titular orchard, symbol both of the family's connection to the land and their failure to make use of it: It only yields fruit every other year, and even then nobody's made so much as a jar of jam to sell in decades. Through a combination of sentimentality, and snobbery that the idea comes from someone they still consider socially inferior, Ranevskaya refuses to entertain the notion of exploiting this land, preferring instead to ignore the problem and hope it goes away.

Even with a writer with as small a major canon as Chekhov, some works seem to come in and out of fashion; The Cherry Orchard is regularly cited as Chekhov's masterpiece but I commented to Ian that it felt like a (comparatively) long time since I'd seen it, with his bleakest plays Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya being most popular in recent years. I was right and in fact it's longer than I realised, nearly ten years since I saw* Katie Mitchell's production. Maybe this is part of why it felt a bit like watching the same play through new eyes, and Andrews' production feels like it focuses especially on this aspect of avoidance.

A lot of attention on this production seems to be on its eccentric performance style, the kind of response I find increasingly odd - although you can still find naturalistic period productions where even the samovar is played by a distinguished character actor, between the Young Vic, Almeida, Southwark Playhouse and Jamie Lloyd Company the idea that Chekhov is less resilient than most to experimental takes seems to have gone out of the window†, and that's definitely how I felt about this sometimes wilfully quirky take: In a play that already features Charlotta (Sarah Amankwah) wandering around doing magic tricks and Gaev's verbal tic of talking about billiards in the middle of an unrelated sentence, we also get Epikhodov's (Éanna Hardwicke) clumsiness turning into full-on clowning tumbles.

When a character isn't in a scene, their actor sits in the front row watching the action, or in the case of Marli Siu's Varya sometimes flinging wellies onto the stage. When characters refer to someone offstage, they point to their actor - sometimes this has a nice dramatic effect, but you can't help thinking Andrews is also aware of the fact that Chekhov characters tend to be referred to by different names in person and behind their backs, so it's a tongue-in-cheek way of telling the audience who's being talked about. When Gaev waxes lyrical about the furniture, Gould brings an audience member onto the stage to play a bookcase, while later others are chosen to dance with the cast during the party scene. 

I can see how this might be a bit distracting to some, but to me it felt cleverly on-theme: The blurring of artificiality and realism means the production's eccentricities are the characters' eccentricities, and all of this feeds into the way they avoid reality. Or as Ian put it, they spend a hell of a lot of time talking about nothing of any significance. Except for eternal student Trofimov (Daniel Monks,) whose problem is he talks about everything of any significance, all at once.

And there's still interesting takes on the characters, like Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea playing the self-serving servant Yasha as a flamboyant ligger who'll shamelessly attach himself to whoever will give him an easy life; or a successful gender-swap for Firs (June Watson,) the aged servant the family on the one hand profess great affection for, on the other are quick to forget when their own problems take precedence. In the second act Andrews turns the beggar who wanders through their picnic into a child (Alfie Tempest, alternating with Milosh Luchanko) who sings for his supper, giving the scene an added ambiguity - the homeless boy is obviously getting the audience's sympathy, but Ranevskaya giving him all her remaining cash is still a ludicrously overdramatic response.

At the centre of it all Akhtar offers an affable everyman quality, whose eventual revenge on the people who once effectively owned his family is a spur-of-the-moment release of everything he's been suppressing rather than something long-planned: His efforts to help them at the start are genuine, a pragmatic response to the problem, which their sentimentality always wins out over. When he finally realises how much the tables have turned, his change seems equally genuine. It's not perfect - the modern references sometimes jar with the freeing of Russian serfs being very explicitly in some characters' lifetimes - but Andrews' Cherry Orchard feels far from a radical departure from the play's actual heart, while also keeping me entertained with a story that can sometimes ramble on enough to lose me.

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov in a version by Bendecit Andrew is booking until the 22nd of June at the Donmar Warehouse (returns, rush and standing tickets only.)

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

*if "saw" is the right word for Katie Mitchell's production, I was definitely in the same room where some shadows moved around whispering on stage

†also I didn't see the Yard's recent production of this play because that place is a pain for me to get to, but that version was set IN SPACE so let's maybe calm down about how nobody's ever dared give Chekhov a twist like *gasp* mild audience participation before