THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Tour to 27 July.
Scotland
THE CHERRY ORCHARD
by Anton Chekhov, translated by Michael Frayn
Benchtours On tour to 27 July 2002
Runs 2hr 25min One interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 6 July at Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
A lively production that misses much of the inner life of Chekhov's play.Chekhov provides a good script for Gerry Mulgrew's production, which reflects its director far more than its author.
There are fine ensemble moments, with music and movement giving a zing between, and occasionally within, acts. Speed is the keynote. Chekhov's opening, with non-family members awaiting Ranyevskaya and her family's return from Paris, is displaced. Instead of seeing the unease between characters in a limbo, we're offered a jogalong train-ride as the family travel home. It's fun, but it says, and tells us, nothing.
Neither this production, nor much of the acting in it, encourages interest in the characters. Ranyevskaya may be infuriatingly impractical, and her type has to go. But she attracts as she annoys; is impulsively, if illogically, generous. An effortful Catherine Gillard gives no sense of how the character provokes such strong affection.
You might pass this entire family without a second glance; the enforced sale of their orchard matters little to them or us. Why should it, in a production that fails to focus our attention on the individuals, instead dissipating it in the excitement of cleverly revolving pieces of set or orchestrated group movement? This foregrounds the background characters; the downmarket party guests the family's nowadays reduced to inviting come over clearly, but a key moment like Varya's unintended assault on Lopakhin is unconvincingly staged. Yet it's a key moment, bashing Lopakhin as he returns the triumphant owner of the property where he was born a servant.
A shame, this, because Deborah Arnott's Varya and Stewart Ennis's Lopakhin are the two performances which manage to give some sense of their character's emotional life; people who can sort out others' lives but never manage to acknowledge their own mutual affection.
For the rest, the show's shortcomings are summed up in the bookcase, a century old and subject of Gayev's tribute to its implied cultural importance. It's hard to take this seriously when the speech is made to a low, cheap fitment that looks as if it cost a couple of roubles at the local junk shop – a dreadful gaffe, whether as inefficient realism or clunkingly misconceived irony.
Lopakhin: Stewart Ennis
Dunyasha: Claire Lamont
Yepikhodov: Alan Tall
Firs: Matthew Bill Boyd
Ranyevskaya: Catherine Gillard
Anya/Charlotta: Susan Coyle
Varya: Deborah Arnott
Gayev: Peter Clerke
Yasha/Simeonov Pischik: Tim Licata
Trofimov: Peter Grimes
Director: Gerry Mulgrew
Designer: Laura Hopkins
Lighting: Paul Sorley
Music: Alan Tall
Tour:
9-10 July Theatr Gwynedd Bangor 01248 351708
12-13 July Brewery Arts Centre Kendal 0l539 725133
24-27 July (mat 27th) Dundee Rep 01382 223530
2002-07-12 00:11:54