Review: The Winter's Tale & The Cherry Orchard

The Old Vic, London SE1

O’ Call back yesterday, bid time return.” Twice we see this line projected above the Old Vic’s stage. And although director Sam Mendes has plucked the quote from Richard II, it serves well as the overarching sentiment for his, at times, almost unbearably poignant productions of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

This is the long-awaited Bridge Project collaboration between London’s Old Vic and New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. And the surprise is that, of these two American and British cross-cast productions, with an ensemble led by Simon Russell Beale, Ethan Hawke, and Sinead Cusack, it is Shakespeare’s strange romance with the ridiculous plot that turns out, in Mendes’s hands, to be the much more moving play.

So moving in fact, that when time appears to have indeed returned, and Rebecca Hall’s dead Queen Hermione is reconciled to Russell Beale’s King Leontes whose jealousy he — and we — are convinced killed her, I could barely suppress the urge to sob.

In Chekhov’s last play, newly translated by Tom Stoppard, only the aching hiatus when Beale’s gauche merchant Lophakhin fails to propose to Hall’s stoic and lonely Varya comes close in emotional power.
Shakespeare comes out on top in terms of entertainment too. Mendes portrays the locations of austere Sicily and colourful Bohemia as versions of Britain and America respectively. Ethan Hawk’s pitch-perfect guitar-strumming rogue Autolycus introduces us to the Mid West prairies where Richard Easton’s wizened shepherd hosts a family hoe-down. And there are thigh-slapping bumpkins whose crude (and unfunny) fertility dance features breast and penis-shaped balloons.

Anthony Ward’s sparsely propped design, sets all the action on a raised platform and often in front of airbrushed, multicoloured skies. It suspends both plays in a kind of stagey theatrical hinterland that is far more suited to Shakespeare’s magical thinking than Chekhov’s realism.

That said, it allows in the Chekhov for a particularly chilling airing of the play’s famous enigmatic twanging sound — the warning of revolutionary change — which is here preceded by a row of proletariat figures lining the horizon like a gathering working-class army. And in the Shakespeare, when Hermione’s baby is left by Antigonus to perish in the wilderness, the heightened unreality of Mendes’s production does not prevent the bear (for whom Shakespeare wrote the immortal stage direction “Exit, pursued by bear”) arriving like a moment of pantomime.

If I have a gripe, it is that Cusack’s Ranevskaya does not transmit the required star wattage in The Cherry Orchard, though in The Winter’s Tale her terrific Paulina is the woman man enough to stand up to Beale’s dishevelled tormented tyrant.

Almost inevitably Beale gets the lion share of plaudits. His King Leontes, superbly supported by Rebecca Hall as his maligned but dignified queen, is a stunning display that melds the madness of Lear, which one day Beale will surely deliver, and the jealousy of Othello, which sadly he almost certainly never will. In large part it is he who makes this time-themed double bill well worth waiting for.

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