The old and the new in The Cherry Orchard with Peter Carroll and Mandela Mathia. Photo: Brett Boardman
Director Eamon Flack has set his production in a country called Rushia. Playing with The Cherry Orchard’s central theme of change, the actors on this stage are in the ‘now’, which he says could span any time from 100 years ago to 100 years hence. When Pamela Rabe’s sunglasses-wearing Ranevskaya appears from Paris, she could have come from lunch with the girls at a cafe in Double Bay. Mandela Mathia’s Lopahkin is no archetypal serf tied to the feudal system. Towards the play’s final scenes, he will celebrate his purchase of the orchard with African rhythms and dance. Tutor Peter Trofimov becomes Petya (Priscilla Doueihy) and no one bats a Rushian eyelid at the romance between her and Ranevskaya’s daughter Anya (Kirsty Marillier). Only Peter Carroll’s endearingly cranky Firs would have been recognisable (give or take a wardrobe change) to the play’s first audiences back in 1904.
Choices such as these may throw the problems facing the Cherry Orchard‘s characters into a more contemporary focus for today’s audiences. Chekhov’s messages of decay and change, of societal striving for more equality in health and wealth, are still there. And here in the 21st century, we’re still cutting down trees and building holiday homes and casinos. Same same, but different.
However, by moving the action away from early 20th century Russia, some of the gravity of the serfs’ struggle is lost and, on a more microscopic level, so too is the destitution awaiting a great many servants if such a great house falls. ‘There’s always tomorrow,’ declares matriarch and landowner Ranevskaya. Well, there might be for her, but not for jobless servants with no Centrelink.
The bare set that opens the play – a chair, a lamp and a great expanse of floorboards – foreshadows a family on the move, that change is in the air. Which it is, of course, because their beloved cherry orchard is up for auction. Madame Ranevskaya, one of an aristocratic elite routinely living beyond her means, has returned to her erstwhile home with vague plans of borrowing yet more money to save it – despite the fact that no one in the family seems to have any idea how to cultivate a single tree. Lopahkin sees a different future: he wants to buy the orchard, cut down the trees and build rows of cottages on the land.
There to greet Ranevskaya is her ineffectual brother Gaev (Keith Robinson), her daughters Varya (Nadie Kammallaweera) and Anya; and of course the household’s servants.
As the ancient retainer Firs, Peter Carroll is the living embodiment of a privileged past that’s about to come to an abrupt end, and he is fabulous. Whether he is silent or voluble – or joining in the dancing that opens the second act, it is hard to look away from him.
Flack wants this production to be seen as a comedy (as indeed Chekhov wanted it to be) and so the party that takes place in the house while the cherry orchard is being auctioned is played for laughs, as if drinking, dancing and denial will solve Ranevskaya’s problems. It just needed a disco ball to complete the atmosphere. As the governess turned entertainer, Charlotta (Lucia Mastrantone) is comically brash and astute. Charles Wu as the cynical Yasha makes detachment amusing. Ranevskaya gets laughs with some good one-liners but there’s more drama than comedy in this Cherry Orchard. In her blood-red velvet and gold heels, Rabe’s Ranevskaya is redolent of an anguished 1940s screen siren (set and costume design is by Romanie Harper); Kammallaweera’s sad Varya is all business and efficiency, trying to keep the household running while dealing with unrequited love and the uncertainty of her adopted daughter status. Doueihy’s more far-sighted Petya gives us her thoughts earnestly and ardently, and it is a fine performance, but the only comedy is in humankind’s inability to recognise its failings, now and more than a century ago.
The production is robust and picked up the pace in the second act. It was a joy to once again see so many actors on stage.
The inevitable happens – the orchard is sold, the trees will be cut down, the household moves out and on to fates unspecified, and only doddery old Firs is left behind. He is in fact forgotten. An old man left to die alone. Cut to present day: how many times do we hear stories of old people who have died at home alone, and not been discovered for weeks or months? It’s a poignant ending.
The Cherry Orchard runs until 27 June. More at belvoir.com.au
Tickets: $33 (student savers) to $89
