There is a performance of such truth in Benedict Andrews’s production of The Cherry Orchard that it takes your breath away. In the opening moments June Watson, as the old servant Firs, creaks, bunched up, across the stage: she shuffles as laboriously as if she were tackling the Russian steppes. Insulted (you bore me, a pampered youth tells her), she finds a heart in the play and raises whimpers from the audience. In asserting her allegiance – “I stood with the ruling classes” – she emphasises the drama’s divided politics. Forgotten in the abandoned house as the axe falls on the orchard, her resignation makes the conclusion more desolate than ever.
Watson turns her small part into a crucial focus. Which is the more remarkable as Andrews’s staging of his own adaptation moves mostly at a different pace. Choppy and fierce. The air is charged with individual and social change: the play, first performed in 1904, pivots on the shift in ownership of land, the ambiguous sounds of emancipation. Andrews seeks 21st-century reverberations: the text is sprinkled with “fuckwits” and “no shit, Sherlock”; a maid hoovers wearing earphones. There is no loitering. The action is fractured: episodes crack quickly on to the stage, wrapped by Magda Willi’s design in a richly coloured carpet with an angular pattern; characters go to sit among the audience as soon as they have finished a scene.
