Review: THE CHERRY ORCHARD, Riverside Theatre
Pared back classic preserves the laughter in the dark
It is apposite that this production of Chekhov’s timeless masterpiece opens on the very day that regional mayors have been granted powers to levy a tax on tourists. That will go some of the way to funding the regeneration of the regions that lies at the heart of the Burnham government’s push for growth in every postcode.
I expect the inheritors of Lopakhin, the first generation bourgeois merchant who purchases the eponymous orchard for development, will be eyeing metaphorical cherry orchards of their own to cut down and replace with social housing (hooray!) or data centres (definitely not hooray).
This production (part of Flywheel Theatre’s Rep season celebrating this venue’s 50th anniversary) is set at a diffferent time of social upheaval in the UK, the (so-called by the rightwing press) ‘Winter of Discontent’, which led, a few months later, to the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979. Indeed, with references to shopkeeping, Rachel-Leah Hosker, catches an early Mrs T vibe when she was still patronised by Tory grandees long before she donned the mantle of The Iron Lady. You can see the steel in Lopakhin’s eye and the bubbling ruthlessness in his deeds - just like one could in Mrs T's.
That said, the 70s props, flared jeans and noises off Radio Four reports of industrial action jar a little against the Russian names, mentioned Russian cities and sheer sense of the vast Steppes so central to Chekhov’s world - we're half in the land of cossacks and half in the land of housewives. I wasn’t sure that gender-flipping some characters worked, as equal marriage was not legal in the 70s in either the UK nor the Soviet Union and is, unsurprisingly, not legal in Russia to this day.
If that diminishes the storytelling with an unnecessary fuzziness, it was good to hear laughter in the house, such an important element of the great playwright’s appeal. Elliot Pritchard is particularly funny as the silly and supercilious Gayev, the brother of the returning matriarch.
Dressed in men’s tailoring with a touch of Jodie Foster in her demeanour, Maggie Bain catches the foolish tragedy of Madame Ranevskaya, doomed by her unwillingness to face up to an uncertain future that looks very different to her (financially) comfortable past. It's a retreat that resonates more and more with me as I get older.
Paul Bentall steals the show as Firs, the aged servant openly pining for the Ancien Regime as he struggles with dementia. Of course, he provokes the grim laughter that the character always engenders, but there’s a real poignancy in his dance of death both with illness and a fate shorn of any good outcomes. The cruelty of the final scene hits very hard indeed.
Edited to an all-through 90 minutes, with a reduced roster of characters, the play gains somewhat in clarity but, unsurprisingly, the richness of Chekhov’s tapestry is truncated. Even with the focus tightly on the sale of the orchard, some of that Chekhovian complexity would come through if the line readings were a little more relaxed, giving us more time to absorb the implications of a play with not a single word misplaced or unnecessary.
That said, this production is a good introduction for anyone wanting to know why the likes of me rate the man as the greatest playwright of them all. But do see a full production too.
The Cherry Orchard at Riverside Studios until 12 September, part of Flywheel’s Radical Classical Rep Season running until 10 October
Photo images: Miranda Mazzarella
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