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The poster for STC's production of The Cherry Orchard is the essence of that thing Chekhov.
The haunted, shadowy face of Madame Ranyevskaya (Rovyn Nevin) peers from behind tatty drapes. Her bewildered eyes suggest a vainglorious past and an uncertain future.
Nevertheless, the playwright himself thought of his last great play as more comedic quickstep than stately pavanne to times past and with Andrew Upton's cheeky, energetic and simple new adaptation, English director Howard Davies banishes languor and melancholy to theatrical Siberia. His fabulous cast hurl themselves into the surreality that was post-czarist, pre-soviet Russia.
The orchard symbolises ownership, identity, class and happiness, all of which are being lost or forever altered. Ranyevskaya and her family are variously unwilling to come to terms with the past.
Or to face the future looming in the form of Philip Quast's bearish, new-money Lopakhin: and inevitability around whom Ranyevskaya flutter like a trapped moth. Truly trapped is her daughter Varya (Lucy Bell), the dutiful and business-like realist who would marry and grow to love Lopakhin if he only had the courage. Her fate - and Bell's exquisite performance - is the emotional heart of this self-consciously loopy production.
John Gaden and Peter Carroll are a pair of cranky katydids: creaking and preening as their deluded notions of their own importance in the scheme of things unravel; while Pamela Rabe grabs her small role (Vita Sackville West as card-sharp clown) with relish.
Bell and Quast are the memorable core of the piece, however, and Nevin's crisp comic timing and perfect silliness actually make Ranyevskaya the tragic heroine she believes she is.
© 2004 Mirror Australian Telegraph Publications
Thanks to Sue H. for providing this review.
