The Cherry Orchard, Donmar Warehouse review — Chekhov’s drama becomes a play for today

How do you measure up to the brilliant contemporaneity of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard? How do you respond to the way a play written in 1903 seems to speak so profoundly to our own times as we struggle to act in the face of seismic change? One recent production shifted the action to outer space, framing Ranevskaya’s hopeless inability to save her estate and its cherry orchard as a parable for a species burning up its own planet.

This spring Benedict Andrews takes a different approach, employing a vivid, splintered aesthetic to express the overwhelming possibility of losing our home. Shearing the play of its period trappings, his new version wraps the audience into a staging, led by the superb German actress Nina Hoss, that seems to unfold as unpredictably as life. It brings a febrile immediacy not only to the characters’ political and economic arguments, but also to their underpinning existential confusion. The whole thing hums with wild uncertainty.

Chekhov’s original opens in the nursery, a location quietly emphasising how ill-equipped the aristocratic Ranevskaya and her brother are to face economic and political change. Here, that childlike bubble embraces the whole theatre. The audience is clasped, with the actors, in a brightly lit, carpet-clad space: the rich, warm rugs of Magda Willi’s set extend up the walls and across the stage.

The cast sit among us between scenes, tumble across the carpets like puppies, and occasionally draft in audience members to play critical pieces of furniture — there’s a playful, freewheeling, slightly unhinged quality to the whole affair. Catastrophe looms, everyone is edgy, but no one is really paying attention. And in this cosy, womblike space, Adeel Akhtar’s excellent Lopakhin, proffering financial solutions with increasing desperation, struggles to be heard — as does Daniel Monks’ earnest student Trofimov, with his astute analysis of the gravity of societal inequality.

It’s vividly present and yet also weirdly off-kilter, like a dream. Merle Hensel’s costumes are a bizarre mishmash of periods and ill-matching styles. These characters seem to inhabit a kind of hallucinatory version of our own world. The tensions in the play — between generations, between old and new, rich and poor, idealists and pragmatists — feel fresh but reach back too across the decades that have delivered us to this point. When June Watson’s immensely poignant housekeeper, Firs, mutters about change, she could mean the Russian Revolution, she could mean glasnost, she could mean now.

There are casualties though. The production’s overall concept overwhelms some of the nuances of plotting and the delicate intricacies of long-standing relationships. The timelessness of Chekhov’s characters arises from their specific circumstances: you lose clarity by uprooting them. There’s also a tendency to push too hard in places. The strange, inexplicable twang heard by the characters is overly loud, for instance, while the ending is strikingly symbolic but flattens out some of the complex poignancy of that final scene.

Even so, this raw, feverish staging feels fantastically alive and chaotically human: a jangled, jangling response to our own myopic age with its myriad problems and inequalities. And it’s packed with wonderful, humane performances, not least Marli Siu’s sad, lonely Varya and Éanna Hardwicke’s touchingly awkward clerk, Epikhodov. At the centre is Hoss’s mercurial, truthful Ranevskaya. Her combination of complacency, self-interest and genuine grief in the face of change feels all too recognisable.

★★★★☆

To June 22, donmarwarehouse.com