Old Fitz Theatre, August 7
8/10
Playwright Gary Owen takes Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, pulls it up by the roots, poaches the characters in the story’s juice, and relocates it to an apple orchard in 1982 Thatcherite Wales. Unlike the Ensemble’s concurrent Uncle Vanya, Owen’s play is more “inspired by” than “adapted from”.
It’s also very funny. Seven cousins of Chekhov’s characters are recognisable in their interrelationships and mostly even their names. The matriarch of this crumbling slice of the upper-class cake is now Rainey, and she’s such a committed drinker that a sighting of her without a glass seems like a sleight of hand.
In a role to cherish, Deborah Galanos employs every strand of her hair and pore of her skin. While the drunken antics make Rainey primarily comedic, she’s more complex than that: wickedly acerbic, sharp-witted (despite the booze), easily bored and relentlessly supercilious. She drinks to dull the pain of the long-ago loss of her little boy and subsequent loss of her husband, but there isn’t enough wine in the world for that. She also drinks to blunt the irritation of having triple the intelligence of most of those around her.
Expertly directed by Anthony Skuse, this Secret House production boasts several fine performances. Especially engaging is Talia Benatar’s Dottie, the uppity maid who’s been with the family since a girl. She shares a bond with Rainey that the latter can’t have with her daughters because they’ll never be her lost son, and yet the confines of class cruelly bonsai this bond, with neither able to express all they feel.
Chekhov’s Gayev becomes asinine Uncle Gabriel, whom actor Charles Mayer ensures has a hint of pathos while being treated by all as inconsequential. Amelia Parsonson shrewdly dissipates her initial fizzing presence as Rainey’s daughter, Anya, and Jane Angharad is intermittently too soft as Valerie, the frazzled adopted daughter. Dorje Swallow is both boorish and creepy as Lewis, the self-made man with eyes for the main chance and for levelling the score, and James Smithers (who also designed the admirable set) excels as Ceri, the firebrand Bolshie, seething with resentment and lust.
Owen’s humour is less gently satirical than Chekhov’s; more hard-hitting. While his ending meanders more, the play’s absorbing in its own right, and skilfully realised. He just should have called it The Apple Orchard to differentiate it.
Until August 24.