Theatre
Withering Cherry
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE
The Cherry Orchard. (Ald- wych.) —Four to the Bar. (Arts.) The Cherry Orchard is held together as a play not so much by its plot as by its theme. Almost every incident and every speech reflects on some Aspect of change, whether it be from the old to the new, from childhood to maturity, or from one class, system or period to another. Almost every character in the play faces some such change in the drifting pattern of life. Some resist it, some welcome it. Thus Madame Ran- evsky and her brother Gaev fight against the loss of their estate, while young Anya and Trofimov see this loss as the gateway to a new life. Firs, the eighty-seven-year-old manservant, has already lived through one such major change, from serf- dom to freedom—an event which he still refers to as 'the calamity.' He cannot survive a second upheaval. He alone stays in the house and dies.
It is this consistency—of one theme viewed from many angles—which gives The Cherry Orchard its feeling of unity. The slender but perfectly chosen plot is just sufficient to give the material a shape, the shape of one complete change. The house and orchard make easy symbols, with a wide variety of associations- childhood, the past, security, a position in 'ociety. The first act, by a clever piece of plotting, intro- duces the characters in a homecoming scene, in which their affection for the house is naturally seen at its strongest; the second and third show them trying to hold on to their home; and in the fourth they leave it. 'Within this simple framework Chekhov is free to treat his theme as diversely as he wishes'without splitting his play into little pieces.
Or so I thought from reading it. 1 missed the Moscow Arts Theatre's visit, and this Aldwych production was the first time I had seen The Cherry Orchard performed. To my horror 1 found myself rarely amused and only slightly more frequently moved. Whole stretches of the play I even found boring. And, worst of all, many of the scenes seemed irrelevant and point- less. Only a subsequent rereading of it has con- vinced me once again that The Cherry Orchard is not a mediocre play.
The production started well enough. The open- ing minutes evoked very precisely the atmo- sphere of waiting late at night for people to arrive, and this mood was soon followed, equally convincingly, by the happiness and ex- citement of returning home. It also ended well; the last scene, with the characters going one by one from a room which has already been stripped of furniture, could hardy fail to be effective. But between those first two scenes and the last I was caught up only by individual moments of pathos and humour, and by the love scene between Trofimov and Anya.
I find it almost impossible to explain my bleak reaction. Much of the acting is good. Judi Dench, irrepressibly happy and delightful as Anya, is perhaps the best of all. Ian Holm, jerk- ing about the stage like a skinned mole and somehow suggesting that the dandruff from his skimpy hair has clouded up his steel-rimmed glasses, makes entirely credible the many jokes about the 'eternal student' Trofimov, who is spoken of as being fifty when in fact he is only twenty-seven. (Today, in the golden age of academic grants, he wouldn't begin to qualify for the student Darby and Joan club.) David Buck gives a superbly arrogant edge to the syco- phantic Yasha, and Roy Dotrice's Firs is such a sturdy old beetle of a man that it seems his sovereign right to lord it over the household.
It may be true that this heightened perform- ance by Roy Dotrice has unbalanced the pro- duction. But, if so, the solution would be to raise the other performances to Mr. Dotrice's level of characterisation, rather than to deflate -his. This applies particularly to Madame Ranevsky and Gaev, with whom most of Firs's appearances are made. Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud fail to lend these two characters a suf- ficiently powerful presence, 'even though specific parts of their performances give one pleasure. Sir John sometimes exploits a line of excellent comic disdain, a most haughty buffoonery—as when Firs admonishes him for wearing the wrong trousers and, without saying a word, he lifts his head and walks away to the other side of the room. Dame Peggy's Madame Ranevsky is charming but somewhat dull. A woman of Ranevsky's sudden impulses, both sexual and financial, could afford to be more flamboyant.
Richer characterisation in these central parts might have pulled the production together without necessarily giving us a household of English eccentrics; and Michel Saint-DeniS's direction would have been tauter without several fussy bits of business which, even though some of them are suggested in Chekhov's own notes, tend to dissipate the attention. But these are little more than tentative explanations of a most mysterious, failure. I have rarely left a theatre more disappointed, and never more bewildered.
Four to the Bar is a very pleasant entertain- ment, somewhere between a Victorian soh* and a cabaret. The host is tan Wallace, bass- baritoning his way with wit and charm through a selection of songs which ranges from Mozart to Flanders and Swann. From time to time Rose Hill takes over from 'him in the upper registers; but comic sopranos, from Anna Russell up- wards, are not my favourite dish and I found Miss Hill no exception. The high spots of the evening come from Bryan Blackburn and Peter Reeves, giving brilliant performances of material by Mr. Blackburn. His technique is to set quick- fire topical lyrics to snatches of old tunes, and to interrupt them with verbal slapstick.
It has been suggested that my review of Big Soft Nellie gave the impression that it was a Theatre Workshop production. It was in fact presented at Theatre Royal by a West End management, but my point, which stands, was merely that the production showed very strongly the influence of Theatre Workshop—presumably because the author and some of the cast have in the past worked with Joan Littlewood.
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