by Tristan Summerscale

Sinead Cusack in The Cherry Orchard

This is surely the sort of production that the directors of the Old Vic were hoping for when they appointed Kevin Spacey as artistic director in 2003. A hugely ambitious tour, a Chekhov play adapted by one of this country’s most distinguished playwrights, a starry cast, and all brought together by Sam Mendes, an Oscar-winning film director with impeccable theatre credentials, having founded the Donmar Warehouse.

The tour in question is ‘The Bridge Project’, conceived by Mendes and Spacey as a means of sharing some of the huge talent and resources of the London and New York theatre scenes and presenting the results to audiences around the world. In this instance it means a cast including Simon Russell-Beale, Sinead Cusack and Rebecca Hall on the British side and Josh Hamilton, Ethan Hawke and Richard Easton representing America. In its first season the Bridge Project is touring with concurrent productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Winter’s Tale and with this first instalment they had succeeded magnificently in delivering on such promising talent.

That the play has its potential pitfalls is not lost on the cast. As Hawke comments in the programme notes in Chekhov’s plays ‘you can step off the rope and fall to your death’. However, in this instance there is an authority in the direction and acting performances and most importantly a pace to the show that ensures that there is no anxiety that can occasionally affect actors and audiences and derail a performance – here you feel safe in their hands.

This is essentially a tragic story, the story of the decline of a family and a way of life, and of characters that are aware of their weaknesses but unable to escape them. It is also however a story that can be successfully played for laughs, and there are plenty in this production. The plot revolves around Madame Ranevskaya (Cusack) who, along with her brother and daughter, returns to her ancestral estate in Russia after a self-imposed exile in Paris. There she finds her adoptive daughter Varya who has been running the house with a motley collection of old retainers. She is also greeted by Lopakhin (Russell-Beale), a family friend who has risen from lowly stock to become a wealthy merchant. She has returned having run out of money in Paris, fleeced by her errant lover and bringing with her a whiff of scandal. She has also returned to see if their estate can be saved, as the mortgage repayments and loans they have taken out against it are about to default, resulting in an auction being planned for later in the summer.

Alongside this main plot thrust, intrigues and romances are being played out. Ethan Hawke’s eternal student Trofimov is wooing Anya, Madame Ranevskaya’s youngest daughter, while pontificating about the importance of work and the changing world to anyone who will listen. This romance is mirrored amongst the employees of the estate. Ranevskaya’s valet Yasha, who has returned from Paris with her, and gleefully espouses all that city’s worldly vices, has a dalliance with the chambermaid Dunyasha that distracts her from the previously welcome attentions of the clerk Seymon Yepikhodov and the oldest servant, the butler Firs longs for the time before the emancipation of the serfs when everyone knew their place.

It is Firs, brilliantly portrayed by Richard Easton, who brings both comedy and a real poignancy to the role, who perhaps best captures the wider theme of the play, the sense of a decline of the old social order when the grandson of someone who was essentially a slave, buys the land that his grandfather worked on from the descendants of his masters. The casualties of this decline are far greater than might first be expected – it represents more than feckless aristocrats being ousted from their family seat. The personal relationships that are built around the estate are far more entrenched than the house itself and the cherry orchard of the title which are set to be swept aside to be replaced by summer holiday cottages (here, as elsewhere, Chekhov beautifully captures the snobbery at work in the play – the cottages represent to Lopakhin the chance of saving the estate – to the Ranevskaya’s the very mention of them inspires discomfort).

Every character in the play has a vested interest in the cherry orchard and what it represents and reacts in unexpected ways to its loss. One of this production’s primary virtues is allowing these nuances to come out. Special mention must be made of Simon Russell-Beale who perfectly manages the complex relationship Lopakhin has with the Ranevskayas and their home – and moreover seemingly effortlessly brings out both the hilarious and tragic elements of the character while always maintaining the sense of a rounded, plausible individual.
These contrasting elements are poignantly and expertly demonstrated in his final rejection of Varya. His awkward and half-hearted courtship of her is wound down in a bleak manner that skilfully blends the tragic and the comic but results in Varya’s collapse into despair as she contemplates an empty life ahead. He is integral to what is a thoroughly rewarding, entertaining and complete piece of theatre and an inaugural success for the Bridge Project and all involved with the production.

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (trans. Tom Stoppard)

The Old Vic, London

Until the 15th August

To book tickets and for more information click here.