Somewhat weaker than its companion The Winter’s Tale, Sam Mendes’ production of Chekhov, here in a version by Tom Stoppard, never quite catches the play’s sense of an era passing and a culture dying. Instead we get individual characterisations of strength and warmth, in a play that might be set in almost any time or place.
Sinead Cusack plays Ranevskaya with a stress on the woman’s having almost consciously given up on life, in part through her sense of sinning which leaves her unworthy of any happiness, in part through being overwhelmed by the noise and bustle of the world. To support this, Mendes stages a couple of moments, notably in the dance while the estate is being sold, to suggest an agoraphobic’s horror of the world closing in on her.
Simon Russell Beale makes the compulsion to work the key to his Lopakhin even more than his rise from the peasantry or his feeling of being out of his element, showing us a man uncomfortable in any and every situation but doing business and unable to comprehend those who don’t think as quickly and clearly as he.
Few in the rest of the cast are allowed to register, nor is there the essential Chekhovian sense of each of them starring in their own separate dramas, although Rebecca Hall gives Varya a quiet if doomed dignity and Ethan Hawke mixes Trofimov’s earnestness with no more foolishness than is inherent and attractive in an idealistic youth..
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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