The Cherry Orchard

Published Wednesday 21 March 2007 at 15:30 by John Highfield

With Jonathan Miller directing and Joanna Lumley starring, there’s a real expectation of something wonderful about to happen at the Crucible, but somehow the anticipated magic never materialises.

Miller keeps things moving along briskly enough - you’ll be on your way home by ten o’clock - but there’s a strange feeling of lethargy about the piece that isn’t in keeping with Chekhov’s study of fading grandeur and lost dreams.

It’s certainly a handsome production, though Isabelle Bywater’s design would, one suspects, sit rather more comfortably behind a proscenium arch than it does on the Crucible’s famous thrust stage.

You can’t really fault the performances. Miller has assembled an outstanding cast who are all experienced enough to know how to get the best from their characters, though they never seem to gel as an ensemble.

Carolyn Pickles gives a delightful comic turn as the family’s eccentric German governess and veterans like Timothy Bateson and Roger Hammond demonstrate how to create moments of pure theatre magic out of very little.

Perhaps it’s a problem with a new adaptation by Pam Gems, but the younger members of the company fail to make much of an impression, the one exception being Lisa Dillon as the unhappy daughter left behind to hold failing family fortunes together.

Tom Mannion is a commanding presence as the voice of a new order, in conflict with Joanna Lumley’s selfish, shallow and sentimental Madame Ravenskaya. Lumley displays enormous charm and can occasionally surprise with a look, a chilling frozen smile, that suggests darker and more dangerous depths to a damaged character.

On the whole though she seems happier in the lighter scenes, and when reality threatens to crash into Ravenskaya’s carefully maintained fantasy world, there’s a sense of an actress having to try too hard to convey troubled emotions.