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You wait 30 years for a Royal Shakespeare Company appearance from Kenneth Branagh and then two turn up at once. Following his Prospero in The Tempest earlier this summer, Branagh takes on Lopakhin, the son of a serf turned businessman supremo in Laura Wade’s new version of the Cherry Orchard alongside a cast that also includes – in a rare instance of star-studded glamour for the RSC – Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman.
It’s hardly a bold choice – we’ve had a glut of Cherry Orchards in recent years; another one starring Kristen Scott Thomas lands in the West End in the autumn. Then again, of all Chekhov’s plays, this jangly comedy – in which the returning Ranyevskaya refuses to accept, despite Lopakhin’s pleas, that she needs to sell the cherry orchard of her family estate to settle her debts – speaks anew to each generation’s innate terror of accountability and change. We all have our own version of the cherry orchard.
Deploying his native Northern Irish accent (and what a delight it is to hear it) Branagh’s performance is full of small surprises. Lopakhin is often played as a brash, puffed-up capitalist; in Branagh’s hands he is, initially at least, shambling, apologetic and, around women in particular, a bashful clown. Yet this former peasant, who carries his humble beginnings like a shard in his heart, has still, despite his hard-earned wealth, the distinct air of a man with his nose pressed up against the glass. There is a wonderful moment early on where he is greeting Ranyevskaya and her brother (an enjoyably flustery Pullman) on their arrival, after their five-year absence, and he registers, with silent fury, that everyone is ignoring him. Branagh too makes subtly clear his eventual victory is pyrrhic having bought the orchard out of love for Ranyevskaya. In doing so, you sense, he loses her forever.
It’s an energetic, charismatic, touching performance, which is just as well since Hunt’s Ranyevskaya is none of these things. Ranyevskaya is a part to relish – a magnetic woman who has everyone dancing round her like moths to a flame, who has the stubborn myopia of only the very entitled – yet Hunt’s performance seems to suck the energy from the room each time she enters it. On first entering the nursery, she stumbles, remembering her dead son, who died five years ago in the lake, yet while her grief provides a rare moral earnestness, you yearn for more of Ranyevskaya’s imperial flightiness and self absorption, her infuriating, dazzling contradictions. It’s odd too that she should make such a fuss over the whereabouts of Firs in the final scene, robbing the play’s closing moments of its crucial cruelty.
Chekhov’s play is deceptively breezy – in truth it’s a vertiginous blend of farce and tragedy in which almost everyone, including the slightly deranged governess Charlotta is two breaths away from a nervous breakdown. Tamara Harvey’s period production – set with a house that seems to shift from mausoleum to candy-coloured party palace and back again – never quite captures its discordant harmonies.
There are some interesting tweaks – Lopakhin throws a punch at the worker who abruptly interrupts the party (and delivers what sounds like a riff on the poem at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty), surprising himself as much as us. The emotionally careless Yasha, meanwhile, idly fondles Amber Gadd’s vividly forceful Dunyasha in ways that are definitely not in Chekhov’s original. Yet the rumblings of off-stage social unrest – the accident in the mine, that worker – don’t carry the necessary strangeness and threat. There is never that essential sense of a family hurtling towards a catastrophe they appear unable to stop.
Elsewhere Michael Elwyn is magnificent in the small but crucial role of Firs, Guy Henry is a desolate comic delight as the suicidal Pishchik while Alfred Enoch’s Trofimov is less a hectoring student bore than a clear-sighted extremist and the only character in the play who is even half way happy. Curiously the production ends not on a note of tragedy but of anticlimactic lightness. Being free of the cherry orchard is, you suspect for this lot, a bit of a relief.
Until Aug 29. Tickets: 01789 331111, rsc.org.uk
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