The Cherry Orchard review: Tonally uneven production of Anton Chekhov’s Russian revolution comedy

A broke aristocratic family face selling their estate, in Anton Chekhov's comedy. Photo: Robbie Jack 

Black Box Theatre, Galway

★ ★

Somewhere on the majestic Russian estate of Druid’s play, the broke landowner Ranevskaya listens to someone explaining the vast debt burdening her home. After hearing the details, her brother Leonid speaks up. “I’ve been asked back to work at the bank. Did I tell you that?” he says. “You’re better off where you are,” says Ranevskaya. 

This family crisis is occasionally interrupted by such absurd conclusions, by random updates on troublemaking locals and dead friends, that ping like non-sequiturs. Tom Murphy’s adaptation seems to take the author of The Cherry Orchard at his word. Anton Chekhov famously insisted it was a comedy, though Konstantin Stanislavsky premiered it as a tragedy.

It’s easy to see the dilemma. How do you let the elegiac moments of loss linger, while giving the fumbling courtships and the bizarre escapes into denial the farcical push they need? Chekhov’s play has recently found lighter touches at no expense to emotional impact. Antwerp’s STAN company staged it as a surreal comedy, throwing the windowpanes open and letting bright sunlight flood in. Here, Francis O’Connor’s mansion set is grey - allowing the primary colours of the fetching costuming to pop, but it is as gloomy as a mausoleum.

Anchored in decay, the play’s levity can come across as forced jollity in director Garry Hynes’s production, similar to the strange laugh let out by Derbhle Crotty’s Ranevskaya, a titter of uncertainty whenever there’s any grave news about her estate. Through the reunions that follow, the maid Dunyasha (Megan Cusack) will flirt unabashedly, the young daughter Anya (Rachel Feeney) will float like a dream, and the tutor Peter (Marty Rea) will deliver a threatening vision of revolution, but not everyone feels like they occupy the same plane of reality. 

If the best course of action is one of taut comedy, Garrett Lombard’s Borris sets a solid example, a flamboyant borrower always asking Ranevskaya for money. (“It’ll turn up,” he says, when asked how he’ll pay the money back). Looking on disapprovingly, Siobhán Cullen gives a magnificent glower as prim daughter Varya. 

The significant innovation of Murphy’s script is the cherry orchard’s fate as a dysfunctional property development. When the new landlord Lopakhin (Aaron Monaghan) promises change, allowing the tenants on the land to buy their own homes, literally no one is convinced. 

That’s at least one persuasive incongruity, in a tonally uneven production. As the sale of the estate becomes clear, there’s an unsatisfying disconnect when the grim-faced aristocrats contemplate their future, before getting whipped into a surprisingly carefree ballroom dance. They can’t see the forest for the trees. 


Run ended. Tours to Bord Gáis Energy Theatre Apr 8-11.