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The Cherry Orchard

 
Rebecca Vines Review by Rebecca Vines 4 Published: 24 Jul 2026 Royal Shakespeare Company Show Dates: 20 Jul 2026-29 Aug 2026

When The Cherry Orchard premiered at the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1904, its staging famously sparked tensions between the author and his director chum. Chekhov was convinced he had written a comedy, a farce, a vignette of absurd aristocrats wholly removed from the reality about to consume them. Stanislavski, his long-time collaborator, saw a tragedy: a melancholic masterpiece about the heavy inevitability of social change.

The Cherry Orchard is ultimately an elegy.

These tensions have duly simmered across a century of admiration, interpretation and reimagining, with each new director wrestling with the truth that the tone, as with all human life, most likely lies somewhere in between.

In Tamara Harvey's production for the RSC, Anna Fleischle's bleached, shadowy set provides a stunning evocation of the fading world the Ranyevsky family are barely inhabiting. There is an ache on stage before a single word is uttered: memories are covered with dust sheets, echoes of lives have been tidied into packing chests. The colour palette is redolent of the vanishing imperial order, and although it is set a full 13 years before the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, the sadness of a world already lost hangs in the air. Skeletons of cherry trees climb the auditorium, scaffolding the house but imprisoning its occupants.

It is a cage from which Madame Ranyevskaya cannot escape, no matter how often or how far away she runs. Because what she cannot evade are the memories that haunt her: the good and the bad. Now, following a five-year sojourn in Paris, she is back in her homeland – a homeland that has already become a mausoleum to the fragmented recollections of the past in which she and her charming, feckless brother wallow.

As Madame Ranyevskaya, Helen Hunt creates a spare, worn husk of a woman. Still beautiful, still elegant, still kind, but without any discernible grip on the necessary minutiae of life. It is as though she stands still amid the scraps of her childhood home while the other characters spin around her, dizzying her with the passions, heartbreaks, hopes and disappointments she once had the emotional energy to indulge in. Frequently portrayed as flighty and silly, this iteration is no less foolish, just defeated by the grinding realities of life and an ever-depleting purse.

Her family consists of an avuncular but hopeless brother (Bill Pullman) and bright-eyed daughter Anya (Chumisa Dornford-May). Her adopted daughter Varya runs the estate with ever-dwindling resources and even thinner patience. As Varya, Esther Smith gives a luminous performance that conjures her frustrations and hopes with nuance and sensitivity. She is both the fulcrum of the action and our gateway to empathising with the confused but decent nobles whose resolute impotence is, ironically, what drives the plot.

This feeble atrophy of the old money is made all the more apparent by the clarity and vitality of the new. Set 40 years after the emancipation of the serfs, class distinctions have softened but are still keenly felt. This generation may not be fighting for freedom, but for the autonomy that makes a free life worth living. The family are genuinely kind to their motley band of servants – likely all they can afford – and inured to their mediocrity. The clerk, tutor, manservant, governess and housemaid all wander in and out of the house with the assumed airs of the gentry, all ambitious but ultimately lacking the wherewithal to propel themselves ahead. Despite their spirit, they are likely doomed to be as stuck as their employers by a system that has reduced them to little more than their station. The only one with any real agency is the merchant Lopakhin, whose strides and gambols about the stage suggest the infectious energy that has helped fill his pockets and lift him beyond his humble origins.

Kenneth Branagh is quite superb as Lopakhin, infusing each of his scenes with vigour and lucidity. From his opening scene, snoozing on a chaise longue (a neat nod to one of adaptor Laura Wade's earlier plays), he commands the stage, and the house he will soon own, in a performance of extraordinary charisma and purpose. As with Varya, it is in this character that the complex emotional register of the piece finds its home, and through whom we are invited to form our own conclusions about the profound social and historical questions that permeate the text. Branagh was born for Chekhov: every word, every look carrying the momentum of neglect, desperation and sheer hard work. It is a divine interpretation that lights up the space, allowing an often buffoonish character room to live and breathe with truth and psychological credibility. Oh, and no one plays drunk as well as our Ken.

As the old retainer Firs (Michael Elwyn) curls up to die at the close of the piece, he accepts his final abandonment as readily as he accepted his earlier serfdom. The only character with no real desires beyond what he already has, Firs has lived and died the happier for it. Almost all other feelings in the play are catalysed by money and status: having it, not having it, needing it, losing it, making it. And if anything leans into Stanislavski's interpretation of a tragedy, this is surely it. While this adaptation works hard to find the humour – with genial twerp Pischik (Guy Henry) and calamitous Yepikhodov (Andy Rush) doing much of the comic lifting – The Cherry Orchard is ultimately an elegy. Not to the lost world of the landed classes, but to the threads of childhood and illusions of happiness that can both nourish and trick the mind. The dreamlike set creates an almost purgatorial moment in time from which the characters cannot escape of their own volition, but only when the painful, natural shift in society forces them onwards. It tells us that it is easy to stay as we are, much harder to accept – and even harder still to effect – the necessary changes in life.

Amir Nisi

Rebecca Vines

Rebecca is an acclaimed practitioner and lecturer with a renowned global practice; and is the current Drama Chairman for the board of the British and International Federation of Festivals. Rebecca began her writing career as a diarist at The Guardian newspaper, and has been reviewing theatre since 2000. Rebecca trained as a performer with the Actors Company, and has written, directed and produced critically acclaimed and sell-out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe since 2003.

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Multi-award winners Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh war over a cherished estate in Laura Wade’s vital new version of Anton Chekhov’s final play, directed by Co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey.

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