Written for Culture Wars
For all its historical specificity to the final strains of Tsarist Russia, The Cherry Orchard’s endurance lies in the permanence of change. There will always be old orders on the wane and new ones, full of vaulting ambition, snapping at their heels. Chekhov’s play can offer a rather bleak perspective, however. Rather than the radical visions imagined by idealists like Trofimov, he can seem to suggest that new worlds are made of the same stuff as old ones.
Howard Davies’ finely tuned production taps into this inevitability exquisitely. In Bunny Christie’s design, the Ranyevskayas’ wooden palace is a constant reminder of what came before. Their home is built from someone else’s trees, just as their beloved orchard will eventually make way for Lopakhin’s holiday homes. Davies deals us a warning against unsustainability that chimes ominously with our current crisis. What it lacks, however, is the harshness and anguish of Ranyevskaya’s downfall. Davies has worked so brilliantly with ideas that the emotional punch of Chekhov’s play becomes muted. Though it amuses en route, Chekhov should frustrate and exhaust. We should be grinning and gurning throughout, but drained empty by curtain down. Here, we are left concerned for ourselves but less for those onstage. The plummet never reaches terminal velocity.
The sense is of a family throwing fuel on the fire to keep the party going by any means. It is a world of complacency, concerned only with the present, in which entertainment and leisure come first. This Zoe Wannamaker conveys beautifully as a chuckling Ranevskaya, tipping her jesters for their mirth. Her home becomes a monarch’s court; survival in it depends on amusement provided. James Laurenson’s jovial Gaev, Tim McMullan’s sozzled Pishchik and Susan Woolward’s loopy Charlotta become children’s entertainers, always ready with a routine or a trick to wile time away with a smile. Even Trofimov and Lopakhin’s central debate is here reframed as pastime, passing over the Ranevskayas’ heads while they lounge in the sun, barely half-listening.
If theirs seems a carefree existence, Davies makes sure that we remain acutely aware of its cost, both material and human. Underneath the frolics are those devotedly fanning the flames. Claudie Blakley’s drawn, stoical Varya furtively keeps behaviour in check, scolding misdemeanours like a frazzled nanny, while Kenneth Cranham’s Firs seems a toy with flat batteries, run down to the cusp of narcolepsy by a lifetime in service. Doting has led directly to his dotage. The system depends on its imbalance and exploitation. When resources dry up, so too do the consumers. Again, Christie’s design is at the fore: her costumes make the bourgeois seem moss against the wood, moist at first, but gradually dehydrating until, finally, they resemble parched, parasitical lichen.
In that, then, is the tragedy of The Cherry Orchard today. Their crisis of dwindling reserves is not only set to repeat itself, it leads directly to our own of plundered futures. With hindsight, there is no hope in Lopakhin, given a fascinatingly complex spin here by Conleth Hill. He is, at best, a temporary solution; one that accelerates towards an accentuated disaster. This does, however, run counter to the play’s own paradox, which requires us to lament the loss of the cherry orchard at the same time as welcoming its passing hands. Framing both incumbent and imminent in capitalist terms makes the transition much of a muchness. We might even welcome Ranyevskaya’s loss and, for all that it marks the shattering of old hierarchies, mourn Lopakhin’s gain.
In fact, those terms may shed light on the biggest curiosity of Davies’s production, namely, that Christie’s set brings to mind not Russia, but the Wild West. The family home, its wood distressed as ever damsel was, looks almost like a Playmobil fort. It’s lanterns and swing doors give a twist of the saloon bar and, when it swings open for scene two outside, we get a small-town square on the edge of a grassy prairie. It’s almost a case of: “Trofimov, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kazan anymore.”
It’s an interesting choice, certainly one that poses conundrums for the viewer. After all, America is so often framed as Russia’s polar opposite. Here, Lopakhin reads in light of America’s could-be-president mentality and Trofimov – a hardened Mark Bonnar – seems unusually ineffectual, his communist manifesto becomes dreamy idealism as opposed to ardent realpolitik. It also implies a doggedness to the Ranyevskayas’ being overthrown. Led by Wannamaker’s Ranyevskaya, whose head is either buried in sand or stuck the clouds (at one point she appears in circular sunglasses, looking like a dreamy Yoko Ono), they come to seem complacent landowners under threat from more ruthless, cutthroat types. Lopakhin, Yepihodov and Yasha as outlaws and cowboys? Perhaps there’s something there.
Such potential parallels exist as echoes beneath the surface, however, and only do so because Davis and adaptor Andrew Upton have mined and refined Chekhov’s originals into strong archetypal forms. Much has been made of Upton’s bashing the language into contemporary shape, but, aside from a few clunks that suggest a keenness to make his presence known (‘Bollocks’ and ‘crap-artist’ jar enormously), it mostly works fine. With Davies at the helm and Christie’s astonishingly layered design, however, it becomes a deeply fascinating lit-crit production, even if it softens the power of the story itself.
Photograph: Alistair Muir/The Telegraph
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