The Cherry Orchard review – the RSC’s starry cast brings a disappointing lack of sparkle

Laura Wade’s reworking of Anton Chekhov’s final, plaintive play brings a dazzle of big names. Helen Hunt is aristocratic matriarch Madame Ranyevskaya, Bill Pullman her brother, and Kenneth Branagh (so soon after his lead role in the Royal Shakespeare’s production of The Tempest) their nemesis, Lopakhin, a shopkeeper’s son here who takes over the reins of the family estate and represents the rising forces against Russia’s old order of ossified elites. But for such a starry cast Tamara Harvey’s production has a disappointing lack of sparkle. You do not feel the story’s charge, its complications around love and its stinging losses. The tone is too soft-edged, almost endearing, and the cast such an ensemble that there is no magnetic centre to hold you. Wade’s new version, based on a translation by Helen Rappaport, seems less like a revisionist re-imagining than an updating of language, comically benign and stranded in a pre-revolutionary Russia in which the two aristocratic siblings, Ranyevskaya and Gaev, speak in American accents, while Lopakhin and servant Yasha (Julian Moore-Cook) are Northern Irish. The point about the accents is unclear, and the production as a whole seems woolly in meaning. The work was regarded by Chekhov as a comedy with farcical elements and Harvey brings out the farce in places, while ancient manservant Firs (Michael Elwyn) is a highlight with his doddering comedy. This does not make up for the lack of emotional and dramatic impact, although the storyline around Ranyevskaya’s adopted daughter, Varya (Esther Smith), and her yearning for a marriage proposal from Lopakhin does develop some emotional dimensions. Like Branagh’s good-natured, sometimes joshing, Prospero, his Lopakhin is amenable, lacking the sharp-pronged anger of Adeel Akhtar’s in Benedict Andrews’ astonishing version of the play at the Donmar Warehouse two years ago. When his class rage comes, following the auctioning of the estate, when he reveals that he is its owner, it …