Dozing in the orchard

The RSC has been on an astonishing run of form lately, especially when it comes to its non-Shakespearean productions; both Cyrano de Bergerac and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui are amongst the best things I’ve seen at the theatre all year. So it comes as a mild disappointment to report that Tamara Harvey’s new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is, if not a disaster, certainly something of a let-down, thanks to an underwhelming star performance, a somnolent lack of dynamism in the staging and a pervasive sense of “so what”? 

There is a tendency in English theatre to play down the essential strangeness of Chekhov and treat it as straw-hatted melancholy, where good chaps drink tea from the samovar and occasionally exclaim about their disappointing love lives, but this version replaces mildness with torpor, to frustrating effect. 

There is a near-complete absence of real invention

I was expecting greater radicalism from the translation, by Laura Wade, who has not only proved herself an able chronicler of the vagaries of the wealthy in her scripts for the new adaptation of Rivals, but has excelled at finding twists on everything from the domestic drama (Home, I’m Darling) to Jane Austen’s The Watsons. Yet here, although Wade gives the characters an appealingly demotic immediacy — one man sighs that his father was “a complete pisshead” — there is a near-complete absence of real invention, save one strange, striking moment when a serf, interloping himself into the group of haves and have-nots that Chekhov explores, begins to recite Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, as seen on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. 

It suggests something more daring than the decidedly boilerplate treatment of Chekhov’s final play about the march of progress, as seen by the contrast in character between the once-privileged, now impoverished Madame Ranyevskaya (Helen Hunt) and the serf’s son-turned-landowner Lopakhin (Kenneth Branagh). She has returned to her crumbling family estate after several years away in Paris, where she has been mourning the loss of both her husband and her young son, only to be confronted by the representative of all things new in Russia, in the form of the energetic, thrusting Lopakhin, who seeks to convince her to sell off the eponymous cherry orchard in order for it to be developed for properties and thereby rescue her fortunes. The play thereby revolves around a clash of personalities and attitudes, interspersed with a rich cast of supporting characters played by an almost overqualified array of British and American actors. 

The main problem, not to be xenophobic, is that Hunt is very bad and that Branagh is very good, which completely unbalances the central dynamic between the characters. Hunt has often excelled on screen, but here seems entirely underpowered, drifting through scenes without any sense of interest or personality. This might be a conscious attempt to suggest someone who has been deadened by grief and has thus withdrawn from society, but Madame Ranyevskaya, as written, should be a force of nature, a charismatic and whimsical figure who you cannot help but love despite her irrationality. Unfortunately, here Hunt blends into the set so effectively that she barely registers at all. 

This therefore allows Branagh to steal the show completely as Lopakhin, which this great actor does with the swaggering ease of a veteran stage star. He has returned to Stratford for the first time in many decades to play in The Tempest and this play, and the fact that every single show was sold out before they even opened is testament to his pulling power. It would be easy for him to coast on charisma and charm, but his performance is full of brilliantly conceived touches, from his Northern Irish accent — a neat idea in a play otherwise wildly inconsistent in how the characters speak — to the way in which Lopakhin feels a deep sense of frustration that all his money and newly acquired standing will not compensate for the way that the aristocratic characters still regard him as a peasant. His almost-romance with Esther Smith’s Varya is particularly beautifully sketched, and the pay-off brings both laughs and a sudden rush of emotion.

Still, it would be unfair to describe this as simply a one-man show. There are finely etched supporting performances from Guy Henry, hilarious and poignant as a failed local landowner, Alfred Enoch as an idealistic student and Michael Elwyn as the old servant Firs, left to die on stage in the final moments of the play, and Bill Pullman makes something of the garrulous Gaev, Madame Ranyevskaya’s brother. But the problem with Harvey’s production, down to Anna Fleischle’s frustratingly vague and period-unspecific set and costume design, is that it feels lightweight and incurious. There have been better Cherry Orchards, and probably worse ones, too. But I have never seen a sleepier or more laid-back staging. Worth it for a dazzling Branagh, but this one will not live long in the memory.