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Has it started? The lights are still on, but a woman brandishing a Henry Hoover on a large rug is trying to avoid a man who has prostrated himself. Actors are now jumping out of the audience, but have they been there the whole time? – Telling jokes, drinking lager, and vaping.
this is not what you expect cherry orchard. But it’s the kind of thing you’d expect from director Benedict Andrews, who has a long history of creating modern works of classical texts, opening up those plays and bringing out the heart. In 2014, Gillian Anderson played his role as Blanche in a revival. A streetcar named desire, Meanwhile, Sienna Miller and Jack O’Connell starred in his mesmerizing 2017 production. cat on hot tin roof.
This is Andrews’ story of an aristocratic family who are forced to sell their land, including their beloved cherry orchard, and includes a surprising amount of antics for both of them. Unique costumes too. His purple macrame cardigan and Groucho’s T-shirt with his Marx specs and what looks like a mole (possibly an otter) wearing a tash are his statement items.
But the most obvious one is the rug (designed by Magda Willi). It’s huge. It covered the entire stage and the back wall, a coppery color that looked like dried blood or cherry blossom stains. The actors stumble out of their seats in the small auditorium and roll around on it like a toddler’s playground. Their dialogue is incoherent and confused, and although there is plenty of humor, which may have pleased Chekhov, who always thought of the play as a comedy, the work often leans toward dirge.
And what is this all for? What quickness is Andrews trying to cut? Well, the main thing is decadence. He leans toward the idea of a family completely helpless, or rather lethargic, in the face of enormous changes. When Chekhov wrote this play, the Russian Revolution occurred a few years later. In Andrews’ version, set in modern times, the same sense of helplessness and lethargy is there, but here he’s talking about climate change. We all experience the refusal of families to admit that they are becoming homeless, that money and class protections are not an issue, that their lives are about to change radically. This is a small scale development. His work depicts all the decadent moments before that precipice and the horrifying fall that follows.
Clever, but also annoying. The first half feels really unsettling and unfocused, with an uncomfortably persistent weirdness. It’s like we’re in rehearsal and the actors are doing some funny practice. Some parts seem improvised, such as “My bookshelf!” Ranevskaya, played by Nina Hoss, hugs the audience and screams. She gives a very good performance as Hoss, especially in the more distressed scenes, and Adeel Akhtar also gives a strong performance as her upwardly mobile Lopakhin. He wants to subdivide the cherry orchard and sell it — “$9 million a year, guaranteed.”
But in the second half, disaster strikes and the humor disappears. First there’s a big party, a live band moves from the wings to center stage, and then the orchard is sold. Suddenly, for a split second, there’s screaming, blood, and shocking fear.
In fact, this is a work created by specific moments rather than functioning as a whole. In the scene where they walk through the orchard, a little boy asks his family for a change. The family jumps back in fear. Then they sing “Angel”. “From Montgomery,” she sang in her beautiful high-pitched voice. Ranevskaya was then seen crying on the rug as Akhtar’s Lopakhin screamed into the microphone, blood pouring from her face.
If those brilliant moments had continued, this would have been a great film. But they are not, rather alienating and a bit confusing. The way Andrews keeps us in the present day has worked well in his previous shows. It brings us closer to the heart of the play. This is where it gets in the way. He’s so focused on one big theme, messing around while the world burns, that everything else – the details of the language, the depth of the characters, the relationships between them – gets drowned out by the noise of the big statements.
Donmar Warehouse, until June 22nd