Branagh outstanding, but Orchard doesn’t fully blossom
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The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov in a new version by Laura Wade, directed by Co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey, at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 29 August 2026.
Review by Wynne Lang.
Chekhov wrote The Cherry Orchard in1903, two years before the first Russian Revolution. He considered it a comedy, though Stanislavski later directed it as a tragedy, and it has been tricky to define ever since. This production, directed by Tamara Harvey and written by Laura Wade, is resolutely comic, though with mixed results.
Aristocratic Ranyevskaya, played here by Academy Award winning Helen Hunt, returns to her family estate after a frivolous few years in Paris. Her money is gone, and the estate with its famous orchard is scheduled to be auctioned off. She is accompanied by her daughter Anya and brother Gaev – Bill Pullman, another starry bit of casting. The estate has been run in her absence by her adopted daughter Varya and is being viewed somewhat rapaciously by local merchant Lopakhin, whose grandfather was a serf on the estate and whose father was a peasant. He is a pugnacious self-made man, and is played with superb conviction by Kenneth Branagh, who uses his native Belfast accent to strengthen Lopakhin’s outsider credentials.
This plot outline is freighted with significance; the old order which can no longer sustain itself will have to adapt or die, and a new middle class is eager to replace it. This is further added to by the appearance of Trofimov, the eternal student who was once tutor to Ranyevskaya’s deceased son. He rekindles a friendship with Anya and brings revolutionary ideas into the play, challenging the entire status quo. He is engagingly played by Alfred Enoch, who has previously excelled at the RSC in Pericles and Henry V, and along with Branagh is the play’s stand-out performer.
The drama moves to its inevitable conclusion; the family is unable to act to save their inheritance, the estate is auctioned, and it is Lopakhin who becomes the new owner. He drunkenly lets his mask of fawning civility slip at this point, and revels in what he sees as revenge for his down-trodden ancestors.
There are diversions on the way - Varya’s forlorn hope that Lopakhin will ask her to marry him; the love triangle between housemaid Dunyasha, the hapless clerk Yepikhodov and the worldly Yasha, Ranyevskaya’s young manservant; and the chiselling of neighbouring landowner Pishchik - penniless himself, always on the make for a loan or free drink. These are the areas where the comedy is mined, sometimes successfully, as Guy Henry provides a good comic turn as Pishkin. However, the comic moment is turned to too readily at times, the clownish Yepikhodov’s stumblings and pratfalls jarring with the play’s central theme being a case in point.
This could be accommodated if there wasn’t an emptiness at the heart of this production which should be filled by Ranyevskaya. Helen Hunt delivers a strangely passive performance which does nothing to convey a genuine sense of loss. You would expect a beloved family home and centuries of history being lost to be grievously felt but nothing comes across, not even anger. It is left to the faithful old family retainer Firs, now in his dotage, who remembers and regrets the freeing of the serfs, to lament what is disappearing.
The live music, although brilliantly played as always, and the set design also contribute to this sense of dislocation. The music is oddly lively at times, the party scene notwithstanding, and the set conveys little sense of the orchard outside, even though boughs are suspended around it. You have the feeling that you could be in a salon anywhere, in spite of occasional birdsong. Ironically, it’s only the noise of trees being felled intruding at the end that convinces you an orchard was actually there. The pale pastels of the set are effective at suggesting slow, sad decline, but as was noted above, muted reaction to such loss is not wholly credible.
In spite of these reservations this was an enjoyable production; not a great one, but certainly a great performance by Kenneth Branagh. The other American star, Bill Pullman, acquits himself well as the rather empty-headed Gaev, obsessed with billiards and with little grasp of the real world. Michael Elwyn also impressed as old Firs, bringing real pathos at the end of the play when he is left in the locked-up house because the family had forgotten about him when moving out- a fitting comment by Chekhov on the nature of class.
For tickets visit: https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-cherry-orchard/
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