In fact she returns to the ancestral country home just in time for it and all the surrounding estates to be put up for auction, just to pay the debts. Lopakhin, a businessman descended from the serfs who once worked the land, has a plan to help her.
But she's too attached to the house and the past it represents to consider his suggestion that the estate be cleared to build holiday dachas, a solution that could quickly pay off their debts because a new rail line has transformed the surrounding area. Ranyevskaya is so determined to keep hoping that things will somehow manage to stay the way she remembers them, that she risks being left behind when the world moves on.
And Tamara Harvey's production feels a bit too close to that itself. Laura Wade's new version of the play isn't fusty as such - it picks up on and focuses on the play's comic elements as well as the nods to Hamlet - but it doesn't have a particularly strong focus either. There's something a bit too vague and understated about both Lopakhin's capitalist drive and eternal student Trofimov's (Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch) idealism, leaving us with little sense of competing visions of the future.
With little sense of what could be, we're left mostly with reminders of what no longer is: Anna Fleischle's costumes are pristine but old-fashioned, the set a much dustier affair; dead trees reminding us the titular orchard hasn't yielded fruit in a long time, the furniture covered in dust sheets, and in the most effective visual, you can sometimes spot faces peering eerily out of the sheets covering the stage, like ghosts of the past.
With the big picture never really building up, and Hunt and SirKenBran oddly subdued, it's smaller moments and performances that stand out. Andy Rush and Guy Henry are largely used to comic effect as Yepikhodov and Pishchik respectively, the endearing klutz and the classic Chekhovian nonentity who doesn't realise he's a nonentity. There's a slightly panicked edge to the comedy of Sophie Stone's Sharlotta, while Esther Smith as Varya gives us the sadness of a woman who's spent her life working to make up for her family's mistakes, but will still get left with nothing because of them.
Michael Elwyn's Firs is memorable as the servant who refers to his own freedom as The Catastrophe, an old man put into a new world but not told how to fit into it. Best embodying the mix of comedy and tragedy though is Bill Pullman as Ranyevskaya's brother Gaev, who retreats into an imaginary billiards game any time an awkward conversation comes up. His denial of the facts is less pig-headed than his sister's, more of an awareness that there's a problem that he's too old and tired to acknowledge.
The production most comes to life in the third act, when the characters throw a party even while the auction to determine their futures goes on in the background. The RSC's contractual use of live musicians comes into its own here, Laura Rossi's music helping build a giddy energy as Ranyevskaya & co fiddle while Rome burns. Wade's version isn't as long-winded as many a Chekhov adaptation so the show doesn't drag; it doesn't really feel like it's made much of a point though, either.
The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov in a version by Laura Wade is booking until the 29th of August at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
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