FeedBare-bones and beautiful: Cherry Orchard at Shaw
Photo courtesy of the Shaw festival.
This is a play that deals with loss—a family loses their home, a mother broods over the death of her son, would-be lovers fail to connect, an old man loses his life. How poignant, then, that a real loss shadows the Shaw’s production. The great Canadian actress Goldie Semple, a Shaw regular for 17 years, was to have starred as Madame Ranyevskaya, but she passed away from cancer earlier this December. The role is more than ably taken over by Laurie Paton, but you can’t help thinking how the loss of a beloved colleague must linger.
Irish playwright Tom Murphy’s translation, first seen at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 2004, is remarkably fresh and accessible. So many Chekhov translations get weighted down with words, or lost in affection. Murphy’s language is sparse and efficient. The cast speaks it without accent—they could be your friends and relatives, talking to you right now. Only in places are you reminded this is an Irish translation, as when someone says “I’m a fine one” or a character asks if a servant’s “in hospital.”
The Shaw’s production, directed by Jason Byrne, builds an easy, relaxed sense of ensemble. You get the essential feeling that yes, these disparate people have spent their lives together, that they both love and hate each other. Too often The Cherry Orchard can come over as self-important posturing; here it’s a quietly heartbreaking portrait of a family breaking apart. Byrne and his ensemble find the rich shadings within Chekhov’s tragicomedy of lost opportunities. In the play, Madame Ranyevskaya, and her absent-minded brother, Leonid Gayev, have come home to Cherry Orchard, their centuries-old estate, only to confront the fact that they can no longer afford its upkeep. They must either change their idle lifestyles or lose their home, grow up together or grow old alone.
Every member of the ensemble makes his or her character a living, breathing human being—not always the norm in Chekhov, where actors can go for overkill. Laurie Paton’s Madame Ranyevskaya is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who doesn’t know it yet. She laughs a little too often, a little too loudly—then, almost imperceptibly, her laughter dissolves into tears when she learns she’s lost Cherry Orchard..As Lopakhin, the businessman who can never forget his family were serfs, Benedict Campbell finds discontent lurking beneath bluster. His rueful farewell scene with Severn Thompson’s pragmatic housekeeper Varya, who loves him but won’t admit it, elicits gasps from the audience. Gord Rand provides quiet wisdom as Trofimov, the perpetual student, while Al Kozlik steals his scenes as spiky Firs, the ageing serf who’s as much a part of Cherry Orchard as the trees.
Byrne makes some of the most effective use of the Court House Theatre space I’ve seen. The Court House is small, with only 327 seats and a small, square thrust stage that can feel cramped. Significantly, Byrne opens up the action. Frequently, more so than in most Court House productions, the actors complete the scene from the steps leading into the audience. It makes the space seem at once more expansive and yet more intimate, drawing you into the play.
Understatement is key here, but sometimes you long for a little overstatement. Peter Hartwell’s economical set design easily transforms from one location to the next, but its gold-beige vagueness evokes little specific sense of place. There’s no hint of cherry orchard, no forest through the trees, no trees at all. Here, Ranyevskaya’s beloved old nursery—symbolic of her childlike resistance to responsibility, and the setting that begins and ends the play—could be any room in any house. Maybe that’s the point—we’re supposed to finish these settings in our minds, or see the parallels to our own lives—but it’s a point coldly made.
Chekhov was notoriously resistant to sound design—he slammed Stanislavski for his love of crickets in outdoors scenes. The Shaw’s production avoids any extemporaneous sound, except for some Stanislavskian crickets, a lively klezmer band off-stage, and the famous chopping down of the trees at the end. Lighting designer Kevin LaMotte has created some truly beautiful images, with many startling tableaux in near darkness. His subtle sunset in Act II, when the scene slowly melts into dusk, is breathtaking. It’s an exquisite, unexpected moment, indicative of this generally unassuming, yet masterful, production.
THE CHERRY ORCHARD
By Anton Chekhov; New version by Tom Murphy
Directed by Jason Byrne.
Court House Theatre through October 2.
Spree critic Ron Ehmke's review of the Cherry Orchard appears in the July/August print issue.
