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 The TheatreguideLondon Review

The Cherry Orchard
Old Vic Theatre Summer 2009

The Bridge Project is a Sam Mendes-directed repertory company made up of British and North American actors, with the twin homes of the Old Vic in London and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Their current season alternates two plays built on regret for passing time, Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and Chekhov's Cherry Orchard.

While there is great pleasure in seeing the same actors in different roles, particularly on the same day, I have to judge The Cherry Orchard the weaker half of the repertory, despite a couple of strong central performances.

Chekhov's greatness as a playwright lies at least in part in his ability to conjure up a whole world through a small domestic story, and to make us understand that every character, even the most minor, is having a life adventure of significance and might well be the hero of his or her own play, were it ever to be written. And those are the qualities I missed here.

Chekhov's story is of a land-owning family who have become so enervated that they can't really rouse themselves to a full awareness of the fact that they are bankrupt and the estate is about to be sold out from under then, and of the former peasant who has risen to merchant riches and, almost without realising it, buys it and sets out to destroy it for profit.

Though the obvious metaphor for the changing times in not Chekhov's primary focus, it provides resonances the play wants. Similarly the large secondary cast become part of the play's rich texture when we become aware of their individual reality and private dramas, but if they are just a secondary cast, they are reduced to distractions that just clutter up the stage.

And that's what happens here. The two central roles - the matriarch of the owning family and the well-meaning but crude capitalist - are well defined by director and performers, and indeed in some fresh ways. But they exist in a vacuum of the sort we don't expect from Chekhov.

Rather than suggesting that her character's fecklessness is a product of her class and upbringing, Sinead Cusack makes it purely individual, based to a great extent on a kind of agoraphobia that makes the real world just too noisy and overwhelming to cope with (a sense that director Mendes underlines by investing a couple of innocent scenes with a nightmarish quality), and in part by a sense of personal unworthiness that makes her accept all life's buffets passively.

Both qualities are suggested in the text - particularly in this version by Tom Stoppard - and I admire Cusack for finding them, even while I wish that she had not done so at the expense of other aspects of the character.

Something similar is true of Simon Russell Beale's Lopakhin. Russell Beale latches on to one frequently overlooked element in the character - the fact that he is a born worker, only comfortable when on the job and equally ill at ease in every other social situation, be it a party or a private moment with the girl he can't quite figure out a way to propose to.

It makes the man very real, and not just a symbol of the new Russia. But it doesn't explain or absorb the entire character, so that some of his behaviour (like an abrupt bit of destructiveness on buying the estate) remains as confusing loose ends.

And director Mendes and his actors are particularly disappointing in making the many other characters come alive. Only Rebecca Hall's Varya, carrying with sad dignity the knowledge that she will be unhappy all her life, and Ethan Hawke's Petya, making the perpetual student admirable and silly in equal measures, make us believe in them.

So this is not a triumphal Cherry Orchard, but one whose missed opportunities are only partially balanced by a few strong performances.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Cherry Orchard - Old Vic 2009