Writer: Vinay Patel
Director: James Macdonald
Updating Chekhov’s play about the demise of the Russian aristocracy in the early 20th Century and setting it in the future on a spaceship takes some nerve. But surprisingly Vinay Patel remains faithful to the original and his script contains some clever reimagining of characters. Ancient retainer Firs is a rusty old robot reaching the end of his unnatural life while housemaid Dunyasha is now computer Divya who, like the maid, talks back with ideas above her station. It’s fun to see Patel’s modernisation but this Cherry Orchard struggles to capture the melancholy of Chekhov’s classic.
Under the direction of James Macdonald ( ex-Royal Court), this version also fails to find the comedy of the original. Often jokes fall flat – a visual and aural joke about a squashed box completely backfires – and one crewmember’s romantic pursuit of the computer is never as funny as it should be. Sometimes directors find too much comedy in Chekhov, but in Patel’s Cherry Orchard there is not enough, and what there is seems mishandled. Only the card tricks of Varsha – a combination of Varya and governess Charlotta – get any laughs.
The biggest change is in the main character. Here Madame Ranevskaya is Ramesh, the commander of the spaceship taking a group of South Asians through galaxies. Usually, Ranevskaya is presented as an innocent who splurges money in an effort not to face the fact that she has no finances. She’s good-natured but frustratingly stubborn and short-sighted. Patel’s Ramesh is more calculating and cold. She’s tyrannical in the way she captains the ship, having little compassion for those who work below deck – the downdeckers – and is particularly cruel when one of them enters the flight deck. Her refusal to turn the cherry orchard that grows in the arboretum into patches of land for each downdecker, a move that could quiet the rumbles of mutiny, is far more devious than Ranevskaya’s blind belief that some good fortune will come to her rescue.
Without this sympathetic central character, Patel’s story is a little flabby, and it’s down to parvenu Abinash Lenka, the ship’s engineer and this version’s Lopakhin, to take control of the plot. His rise up the ranks appears to be the main narrative here and unlike the original character, Lenka is rational and magnanimous in his move up the social scale. But of all the crew it is Firs – renamed as Feroze – who seems most real, even though he is an android. Of them all, he signals change is coming.
Hari Mackinnon gives an excellent performance as Feroze, never overplaying the robotics, and, as Feroze’s knowledge slowly fades away, he provides the perfect amount of pathos. When he sings an old sea-shanty as the family watch an eclipse, the past seems very far away. As Lenka, Maanuv Thiara does well with all the exposition he is made to give and his yearning for Varsha in the final scenes is nicely done. Tripti Tripuraneni tries hard to portray Varsha’s loneliness, but the crying and the shouting undermine her patient resolve.
Anjali Jay is the icy Captain Ramesh, and it’s difficult to share her love of the cherry orchard. Ramesh has been on the spaceship her whole life but Jay is unable to relay her passion for stasis, for the only world she knows. We only see a glimpse of the cherry orchard at the end; one character packs up a flowering twig, and then another branch flashes up on a monitor. Rosie Elnile’s revolving sci-fi set looks the part and Jal Morjaria’s lighting design ably depicts the emergencies and the eclipses. The lights hover low, too in the last scene, and it is here, finally, that Patel’s play finds the sadness inherent in Chekhov’s original.
Runs until 22 October 2022
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Sowing the seeds of change
