The Bridge Project is a joint venture between Sam Mendes and Kevin Spacey, created to deliver Anglo-American productions of six plays over a three-year period.

In its first instalment, transferring here from the Brooklyn Academy Of Music, Mendes directs fully cross-cast productions of Shakespeare’s The
Winter’s Tale and Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

The latter appears in a supple new version by Sir Tom Stoppard, based on a literal translation by Helen Rappaport. It’s a play well suited to the present moment, given its suggestion that our financial relationships are at least as important as our domestic ones.

At the same time, it makes the point that change (the loss of our property, both material and metaphysical) is inevitable.

Chekhov insisted The Cherry Orchard was a comedy bordering on farce, while Stanislavski stressed its tragic qualities, and Stoppard’s rendering conveys its mix of attributes — the light humour, nostalgia and moments of sombre realism — as well as introducing a few craftily Shakespearean touches.

Although Chekhov characteristically emphasises the ensemble, the key role is that of Lopakhin, and, as this frustrated and somewhat evasive former servant who’s now a rich entrepreneur, Simon Russell Beale gives a sensitive performance.

The juxtaposition of the two plays allows us to see the actors’ range, and Russell Beale, perhaps lacking a certain animal menace as Lopakhin, proves more completely suited to the Shakespeare. As Leontes, his intelligence illuminates every scene in which he is involved.

Rebecca Hall, powerful as Chekhov’s Varya, makes a dignified Hermione, while Ethan Hawke, who plays the roguish troubadour Autolycus as a cross between David Blaine and Tom Waits, brings a Gothic mystery to the “mangy” student Trofimov, and Sinead Cusack, a leonine Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, delivers a captivating performance as the extravagant matriarch Ranevskaya.

Contrary to expectation, the mixture of British and American accents doesn’t jar. But there is a sense of imperfect chemistry.

Both plays, for instance, contain pastoral interludes, and neither really works. The festive opening of the second half of The Winter’s Tale is weak — an embarrassing foray into erotic balloon modelling. 

Anthony Ward’s sets, constrained by the demands of repertory, are spare but effective, and Paul Pyant’s lighting is excellent. Mark Bennett’s music, which makes haunting use of an aluminium harp in The Cherry Orchard, is atmospheric though far from euphonious.

Sam Mendes’s direction displays imagination, but sometimes lacks rhythm. At the start of each play the words “O call back yesterday, bid time return” are projected onto the set. The quotation, from Richard II, highlights the two dramas’ shared concern with transience, memories and dispossession. It’s a contrivance symptomatic of an approach which, in straining for significance, can appear fussy or obvious.

Without doubt this first chapter of The Bridge Project is a significant theatrical event.
But its logistical complications, described by Mendes as “a bit like a Rubik’s cube”, have resulted in a pair of productions that do not fully satisfy.