Precisely one century ago Anton Chekhov’s final play, and greatest masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard, reached the British stage. It was a momentous and significant event in the history of this country’s theatre. And it took place right here, at the Oxford Playhouse, in a production mounted by students and professionals.
How fitting it is, then, for a student production company to re-mount and re-imagine this play on the same stage. Its overriding themes, of the old giving way to the new, of modernity vanquishing tradition, and of a brutally monetised future laying waste to a more innocent, if misguided, past, feel as relevant today as they were a century ago. In his informative and beautifully-written programme notes, director Harry Brook, of An Exciting New Productions, describes his interpretation as ‘looking forward and backward with Janus-like faces’. It certainly does that, and it builds to a climax that is eye-poppingly original and simultaneously makes perfect sense.
In the opening act there is a moment when Gaev, played with feverishly convincing early-onset Altzheimer’s by Cosimo Asvisio, delivers a eulogy to a bookcase that is (like the play) a hundred years old. It’s an astonishing Russian doll moment: the bookcase seems to symbolise the very play in which it is appearing. Is The Cherry Orchard itself like the orchard: ripe for knocking down and rebuilding with new tools?
For the first three acts, events play out more or less as they have in countless previous Cherry Orchards. Every character, consumed with self-interest, can talk only about their own problems. They are desperate for sympathy; they receive only selfishness in return. The production captures that heart-rending emptiness of begging for pity before finding no one is listening to you, while a trio of piano, cello and violin provides a sweet, ethereal background to the breaking of hearts and wine glasses. Jules Upson makes for a fidgety, impulsive Lopakhin: awkward, nervous, but determined to take his place as the nouveau riche Lord of the Manor. If he was in The Traitors he’d get banished in no time. But money is power, and he knows he’s going right to the Final. Opposite him, Ilse-Lee van Niekerk as Madame Ranyevskaya is genuinely moving as she side-steps every question she needs to face, and hopes against hope that all will be well.
Esmé Buzzard’s translation is vibrant and witty – just as Chekhov wanted. But having all the characters constantly swearing in the first three acts is jarringly anachronistic. If the play had been set in, say, the 1970s, then the parade of ‘fucks’ and ‘shits’ would make sense. But since it is clearly set in the still-class-bound world of Russia in 1904 it seems too much of a stretch to give, for example, Varya lines like, ‘Shut your face, you nerdy little fuckwit.’
The one piece of casting that feels out of kilter with the rest of the production is Joe Rachman as the elderly manservant Firs. Rachman’s acting abilities are beyond reproach, as he has proved with previous performances. He has the precision and exaggerated physicality of a gifted mime. But making Firs an Igor-like crone, while courageous, undermines the compassion the audience should feel for the old retainer.
At the end of the third act, the self-made man Lopakhin buys the cherry orchard. And with that comes the great twist in this production.
The moment when ownership is transferred is also the moment when modernity takes over, and the past is swept away. Before the audience’s eyes, the cast dismantle the set, revealing lighting rig, ladders and stage weights. They shed their fin-de-siècle costumes, and appear instead in modern clothes. They sit facing each other in stark, straight rows of chairs. The lights flash on and off more like an interrogation room than a dacha. Only Madame Ranyevskaya, the deposed queen of the defeated aristocracy, remains in her Victorian costume, out of place and reviled by the others. The final act plays out in this new, recognisably modern world. (And how much more powerful the foul language would have been if it had been held back and unleashed at this point.)
When the characters leave their home forever the back wall of the theatre itself opens up, revealing the marquee roofs of The White Rabbit pub and the strolling crowds on Friars Entry. This is the world into which they literally disappear: our world. A world foretold and anticipated by Chekhov all those years ago. It’s a genuinely unforgettable, heart-in-mouth moment of theatre.
As Firs, the final relic of the bygone age, twitches to a lifeless and abandoned corpse in the play’s last moments, the original script calls for the sound of a breaking string, dying away. The cherry orchard is being demolished. In Brook’s production, that final sound is a chainsaw. Not only is it a brilliant contemporary equivalent; it also brings to mind the destruction of the world’s modern ‘cherry orchards’ in the Amazon rainforest. What sort of world will this play portray when it’s mounted again at the Oxford Playhouse, a hundred years from now?