THE CHERRY ORCHARD. NOT A REVIEW OR MAYBE IT IS, I'M NOT SURE.

This isn’t a review, it is just some thoughts. And bloody hell is it hard to write a blog on a phone on the late train home!?

I often wonder if Chekov had any affection for any of his characters, he seems to sit like a Grandfather once removed from emotional attachment - to the point of ambivalence - looking at his series of grandchildren, playing, goading and failing in their lives, not giving them unconditional love or a rescue from their emotional pratfalls.

The Cherry Orchard at The National taps into this detachment perfectly, maybe too perfectly. Although I will say, for once, his ambivalence is tempered through humour though and it is here that the warmth does bleed through, a warmth of humour so often overlooked by directors in the earnest study of a Russia in flux. What stood out to me most in this production is how prescient (I have used this word twice in as many blog entries - I need to get another word) the writing (aided by historical hindsight) was, coaxed out in the translation with a very modern speech patterns, and how it seemed remarkably apposite to our current political situation, I feel that there no mistake in the subtext of Englishness of the production.

It is easy to see now how each character is on the precipice of a new and fundamentally altered existence. The loss of the old guard in Ranevskaya and her brother, the downward class mobility of her daughters with quiet acceptance, the rise of the middle-classes following the abolition of serfdom, seen in Lopakhin, hollow victories in economics but still unable to rise above the reverence that history forces him to bestow on Ranevskaya. Tragically, we sit there knowing that for all of their achievements, in a few years they will have to relinquish it to the communist state. The eternal student Trofimov, naïve yet inspiring, is about to get his utopia and will undoubtedly embrace it regardless of the dissatisfaction it will engender - making me very concious of the adage, 'Careful what you wish for.'

The servants, although used as tools to book-end the scenes remain the most keenly drawn characters, reflecting the reality away from the grandiose mechanics of class struggle, economic power struggles and the eve of revolution. These are people who are living their lives, giddy and love-struck, predatory and selfish, foolish and aspirational and empty without purpose. These are the characters audiences identify with, humans moving from day to day, responding to the changes in their lives that they have no power to control, surviving how best they can.

In short I thoroughly loved the production, Zoë Wanamaker fantastically conveys a woman stalling the inevitable and in acceptance of her flaws embraces them and holds them up with an emotional superiority to all her question her. Mark Bonnar is urgent, pious and everything we have come to expect from a proto-revolutionary. Kenneth Cranham, so deathly I fear for his health, but greatest praise for the complexity of Conleth Hill’s performance, portraying the middle-class angst with such (and literal) dexterity.


Go and see it if you can.