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London,

Even Chekhov threw it out

By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard  27.05.08

The axes could not fall soon enough for me on Philip Franks’s mildewed production of The Cherry Orchard, which neither grows nor flowers but droops through four arid acts.

Chekhov’s great, heartbreak drama, underscored by notes of dark comedy and satire, views Russia’s impoverished gentry in landed inefficacy. Too slow-witted, indolent and romantic to save themselves or their estates from take-over by a breed of businessmen, these flawed, adorable people spend one last summer ignoring the forces of change that will culminate in revolution.

Franks fails properly to register Chekhov’s political or emotional themes. The star attraction, Dame Diana Rigg as Madame Ranevskaya, the Cherry Orchard’s owner, contents herself by merely twinkling in chic costumes, as if nothing more vital was at stake than a few old trees and a disused bookcase. Designer Leslie Travers’s hideous eyesore of a set gives the cue for this trivialising tactic.

Chekhov wanted audiences to appreciate the estate’s seductive aura, its flowering cherry trees and sunset rural views, its grand interiors and nostalgia-bound nursery. Travers ignores this evocative framework and process of change. He pictures the estate as nothing more than a grey-walled extension to what might be a 1970s bed and breakfast hotel. It is denuded before the action even begins. A broad, narrow slot, high above the action, contains a cherry tree branch.

A vein of inappropriate, snobbish condescension characterises Michael Siber ry’s Yermolai Lopakhin, that wily businessman and peasant’s son who buys the estate. Siberry reduces him to a joke figure, a nasal, social shambles of a misfit.

Similarly, Simon Scardifield interprets that eternal student Trofimov, with his inspiring, revolutionary agenda, as a silly geek.

Dame Diana, a bit senior to play the mother of Charlotte Riley’s teenage Anya, captures none of the comedy of Ranevskaya’s dizzy-minded romanticism or her grief-struck sense of loss — an aspect similarly missing from William Gaunt’s pompous Gayev.

It is Jemma Redgrave’s stricken Varya, Maureen Lipman’s amusing, solitary Charlotta together with John Nettleton’s decrepit land-owner and Oliver KieranJones’s swaggering Yasha who have the ring of Chekhovian truth.

That omnipresent maker of “versions” of foreign texts, Mike Poulton, offers a contemporary if unpoetic Cherry Orchard that strikes some false, vulgar notes and even introduces an ill-fitting Act 2 finale that Chekhov discarded. A Hampton, Frayn or Stoppard translation would surely have been far more illuminating.

Information: 01243 781312.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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