Director Howard Davies’s and adaptor Andrew Upton’s have great Russian form: Gorky’s ‘Philistines’ was the pick of the National’s 2007 season and their last venture, Bulgakov's 'The White Guard' was a highlight of 2010.
Their new version of Chekhov’s ‘Cherry Orchard’ is also an arbour of cultivated acting talent. Bunny Christie’s design is ravishingly ramshackle. Zoë Wanamaker is a growlingly sensual presence as doomed aristocrat Ranyevskaya. And, despite the pretty period dresses, Davies’s production is refreshingly hardline. But this is sawn-off Chekhov: a brutally modernised script stops this ‘Cherry Orchard’ from achieving full-bloom.
Beauty isn’t a priority in Upton’s free adaptation: Conleth Hill’s nouvea-riche peasant Lopakhin berates Ranyevskaya because he’s told her ‘a thousand bloody frigging bloody times’ to avoid bankruptcy by flogging her orchard in lots. It’s a semi-plausible idiom for him, but it’s as if the whole play has been rewritten years later by Lopakhin – with heavy lashings of dramatic irony, to prove how silly the toffs were and how right he was about the future of the leisure industry.
Chekhov died before Russia’s revolution. But Upton’s modern vocab and crass use of hindsight destroys the subtlety of this prescient portrait of a world trembling on the verge of change.
Theatre has to breathe new life into old plays. But Davies’s production struggles to create a world for Ranyevskya’s family to fail in, though it does strike fine individual notes.
The ever-excellent James Laurenson is a kindly, mincing delight as her coddled, clueless elderly brother. Sarah Woodward is hilarious as the abrupt, eccentric governess who now earns her place by doing magic tricks. And Tim McMullan is superb as a gallant, snobby neighbour, who clutches Ranyevskaya with genuine affection as he touches her for a loan she can’t afford but gives anyway.
But Chekhov’s play is more than the sum of their parts because the writer dramatised human life as he lived it – in ensemble. In this production, the laughter is bitter and the tears which could sweeten it are never drawn out.