✭✭✭✭✭

by Anton Chekhov, directed by Jason Byrne

Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 27-October 2, 2010

“The Cherry Orchard as Comedy"

To experience ensemble acting at its finest, be sure to see the Shaw Festival’s new production of “The Cherry Orchard”.  Under Jason Byrne’s insightful direction, every actor in every role contributes to the overall impact of the play.  Irish playwright Tom Murphy’s 2004 adaptation is bright, clean and colloquial.  Even if you know the play well, Byrne’s direction brings new light to scene after scene in Chekhov profound dissection of human folly.

Productions of “The Cherry Orchard” usually suffer from two key errors in judgement.  First, the play is too often mounted as star vehicle, particularly for those in the roles of Ranyevskaya, Gayev and Lopakhin as is was at the Stratford Festival in 1998 and 1987.  Chekhov pioneered ensemble acting and to treat certain roles as more important skews the balance of action and emotion within the play.  Second, Chekhov labelled “The Cherry Orchard” a “comedy”.  People are so accustomed to thinking of Russian literature as depressing, they forget that from Gogol through Nabokov there is a strain of satire and comedy.  When “The Cherry Orchard” is presented as a tragedy, we are forced to regard the passing of an ancient estate to the descendant of one of the serfs who worked in it as negative.  Chekhov does show the passing of an age--from useless gentility supported by slavery to business-minded activity--but that is only sad if we side with the gentry who Chekhov shows are  clearly too self-obsessed to engage with the practicalities around them.  Chopping down pretty cherry trees as Lopakhin does at the end to develop the estate is not nice and we feel that appreciation for beauty has been replaced with something crass.  Yet, Chekhov’s satire shows that such a situation is inevitable when those who own the land do nothing to act to save it.  Byrne signals this in a clever way through a sound cue.  Instead of the random sound of an axe heard offstage, we hear the mechanically regular sound of a clock ticking underlining the notions that everyone is a creature bound by time and to wish time to stand still is folly.

Those returning to the family estate after an absence of five years are Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya with her daughter Anya and valet Yasha along with Anya’s German governess Charlotta Ivanovna.  They are welcomed by Varya, Ranyevskaya’s adopted daughter who has been running the estate; Leonid Gayev, Ranyevskaya’s brother; Yermolay Lopakhin, a local merchant whose family were once serfs on the estate; Dunyasha, the chambermaid in love with Yasha; and the aged footman Firs.  Also, present is the student Petya Trofimov, who once tutored Ranyevskaya’s son Grisha, whose death by drowning five years ago was a major reason Ranyevskaya fled to Paris.    

Like all of Chekhov’s major plays “The Cherry Orchard” has the structure of a theme and variations.  All of the characters suffer from such self-absorption that they hardly engage with each other in a meaningful way or with the looming problem that the estate must be sold.  As Ranyevskaya, Laurie Paton is at once full of human warmth but prone to irrational behaviour.  She is aware of her own flaws including a tendency to impulsive behaviour, but not so aware that she attempts to control it.  In too many productions director ignore the series of letters Ranyevskaya receives from her no-good lover in France.  Byrne does not.  Although he has Ranyevskaya crumple the first letter in vain attempt to show her new commitment to living in Russia, from that moment on, her mind is elsewhere and each subsequent letter draws her mentally away from her homeland that the symbols of her youth.  In other productions, her departure for Paris after the estate is sold looks like escape from the sadness of that event.  Here, her departure seems inevitable long before that.

Jim Mezon is another version of Ranyevskaya, foolishly addressing a speech to a bookcase and aware of his foolishness.  He mutters the plays in a mental billiard game to himself throughout the action and Byrne often has him turns his back to the audience to show mental isolation from everyone.  As Lopakhin, Benedict Campbell seems like the only practical person in the play, but his past poverty has led to an obsession with making money.  When Lopakhin buys the estate at auction, Byrne has Campbell do an ecstatic dance of joy wilder in emotion than anything Campbell has done before.  One might think the student Trofimov intelligent.  He gives an impassioned speech about how work will save mankind in the future, yet Trofimov himself does not work but continues what seem to be endless studies.  Gord Rand wonderfully conveys the young man’s sense of self-importance and obliviousness to his own hypocrisy.           

Mark Uhre’s Yasha is intensely dislikable and intentionally so.  He is a servant but has taken on the Parisian ways of his mistress and now feels himself superior to his fellow servants back in Russia.  The supercilious bear Uhre give Yasha is alone enough to make us hate the character for his pretensions, let alone his attempts at elevated speech.  The make Dunyasha’s infatuation with him all the more pitiable and yet a sign of her inability to see him as the cad he is.  Julie Martell gives a full-blooded performance of the deluded young woman.  As Varya, Severn Thompson shows a woman whose has become so convinced that her life must be a life without pleasure that she can’t see when another choice beckons.  The scene when Varya and Lopakhin are finally alone and Lopakhin intends but fails to propose to Varya is sadly comic in the revelation of the limitations of both characters.  Neil Barclay as the family friend Pishchik Craig Pike as Yepikhodov, Robin Evan Willis as Anya and especially Al Kozlik as the ever loyal Firs complete the outstanding cast with indelible portraits of their characters.  Gabrielle Jones’s eccentric Charlotta, who admits she does know who she is or why she is alive, states overtly the truth underlying all the characters.  

Peter Hartwell cleverly solves a design problem in a play set resolutely indoors for three acts except for Act 2 which must be outdoors.  Hartwell simply has Kevin Lamotte light the windows that form the back of his set from behind for Act 2 to show us that we are outside the house.  I’ve never seen so elegant a solution.  But that solution is quite in keeping with Byrne’s approach to the play in general that by not forcing the play into the mold of tragedy more clearly brings out the complexity of its true nature. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Robin Evan Willis, Laurie Paton, Severn Thompson and Jim Mezon. ©David Cooper.