The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) present a star-studded staging of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in the Swan Theatre this month. Also featuring Hollywood legends Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman in their RSC debuts, the play is the second production in a row with Kenneth Branagh in the lead - his previous offering being The Tempest in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. 

The Cherry Orchard is another beast entirely - a spiralling, surreal, but very human drama, with stellar performances, and poignant moments which sit side-by-side with farcical comedy.

The play begins with a grand homecoming - that of once wealthy landowners Ranyevskaya (Helen Hunt) and her brother Gaev (Bill Pullman), whose lifestyle of luxury has hemorrhaged money and left them starry-eyed and detached from the reality of normal people. Awaiting their return is Lopakhin (Kenneth Branagh), the son of a serf who was taken in by the rich household as a child, and is now a wealthy merchant. 

Pullman as Gaev exasperates the younger generation with good-natured but long-winded stories, while Hunt’s Ranyevskaya is effervescent, dreamily sweeping the others along with her whims, while nursing personal tragedy. Branagh’s Lopakhin is charismatic and likeable - deeply invested in the siblings' life, although never quite at home. 

The play begins in an expansive mansion where, courtesy of Anna Fleischle’s set design, everything has been shrouded in dust sheets, making the furniture look like marble, frozen in time. Lighting design by Aideen Malone hints at the house’s huge windows, which look out upon the Cherry Orchard of the title. 

Lopakhin maintains that selling the orchard land to build upon would solve all of the family’s financial woes. Ranyevskaya and Gaev are not ready to let the orchard go - even though it stopped producing cherries long ago, leaving grief and unrest to hang over the household instead.

The play has been adapted in a new version by Laura Wade, and directed by the RSC’s co-artistic director, Tamara Harvey, after the pair collaborated on a triumphant production of The Constant Wife last year. In a similar vein, Wade’s script for The Cherry Orchard is modern and exceptionally fast paced, which shines in the play’s lighthearted scenes - although the style is less suited to the more sombre moments. 

Harvey’s direction also makes the most of those comic moments - the actors’ delivery is larger-than-life, magnifying the emotions of the characters, and those emotions are the engine which runs the play. The assembled characters yearn for each other, as love triangles, forbidden romances and unspoken engagements abound. 

Alfred Enoch’s Trofimov - a pretentious perpetual student - and accident-prone Yepikhodov, played by Andy Rush, bring lighthearted comic expertise to their scenes, and Sophie Stone as Sharlotta adds an injection of clowning. The bittersweet undertone is never out of sight, however - overworked Varya (Esther Smith) and the elderly house-servant Firs (Michael Elwyn) show off impeccable comic timing paired with genuinely heart-wrenching moments. 

The Cherry Orchard is a sweeping tidal wave of a production, perfectly suited to the intimate auditorium of the Swan. It carries its audience forward, from its engaging first scene, opening a window onto the lives of its characters, until the sun finally sets on the household and the orchard.

Four Stars

The Cherry Orchard was reviewed on Tuesday 21 July by Jessica Clixby at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it shows until Saturday 29 August