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.
As the commanding landowner Ranevskaya, Nina Hoss is ardent, bowled over by sorrow – at the death of her young son as well as the loss of her home. She moves with the bearing of one used to trailing a household behind her, yet delivers a speech about compassion with a generosity that might have been fresh scripted to show Chekhov’s lack of self-regard. Adeel Akhtar as the coming man Lopakhin glowers and explodes unpredictably, as intriguing as he is when playing the hangdog cop in the Netflix series Fool Me Once.
The move to shake Chekhov out of being decorative, to show him as seismic, comic and prophetic, is welcome. Yet it is becoming almost more surprising to see a samovar in his plays than, as here, a drum kit, and there is a loss in making apparent every subterranean tug: the absence of that particular Chekhov sight of characters simmering together in their isolation. There are plenty of gleams and flares here: they do not add up to a revelation.
The visual whiz of Minority Report is in direct proportion to the puniness of its psychology. Director Max Webster has an impressive record as a theatrical conjuror: last year he recreated Macbeth with a wild soundscape; in 2019 he staged the puppet Life of Pi. Yet his production of David Haig’s play, based on a 1956 short story by Philip K Dick, bends only the eyes, not the mind.
Set in 205o, when the NHS has long been dismantled and Apple watches have enjoyed a quaint retro revival, the plot turns on questions of free will and a surveillance state. What would the world be like if murders could be predicted by the monitoring of chips implanted in brains and future perpetrators incarcerated so that the country was crime-free? Would we, should we choose safety or freedom? Or is it a false choice?
Jodie McNee, sleek as if she has been digitally generated, with quiff and leather and an air of authority, plays the scientist who, having invented the crime-battling brain-invasive system, finds herself compromised by it. Supplied with a skinny backstory and surrounded by some dodgy dialogue – “I did it for you – for us” – she (in Dick’s story the figure is a he) has the impossible task of making edging along a 2ft-high parapet look dangerous, while peril takes the form of blokes in big boots and overcoats squaring their shoulders in slow motion.
The evening belongs to Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting – torches swoosh through the darkness, huge shadows loom – and to Tal Rosner’s space-melting videos: the glass-clad skyscrapers of a future Islington dissolve under Rosner’s ripples; metal-clad rooms swarm with neon numbers; congregations of human brains are displayed floating like airborne cabbages. There is plenty of dazzle, but little dilemma.
The tremendous impact of Mr Bates vs the Post Office raises the question of why there are so few campaigning plays. Laughing Boy is one such: a tender, furious account of an avoidable death. Stephen Unwin’s drama is adapted from Sara Ryan’s book about her son, Connor Sparrowhawk, who was 18 when he died in an NHS assessment and treatment unit.
Unwin’s production warmly conjures Connor’s single-mindedness: he hated sleeping, took a passionate interest in London buses and insisted on wearing a police tabard with bright orange binoculars. He was autistic, epileptic and had learning difficulties but, sweet with his close family, seemed to have a secure future until he began to suffer from violent rages, crucially when he was moving from child to adult care. He was taken into a unit specialising in short-term help for autistic people. He died there, having suffered an epileptic fit in the bath.
Ryan campaigned to expose the institution’s failures: Connor was left unsupervised, his epilepsy was not properly documented, staff did not attend to what she had told them. Some caricature of medical staff diminishes the play’s argument but the underlying theme of the inadequate care for people with learning disabilities is made blazingly apparent. Not least because mother and son are so precise. Janie Dee is taut, not trembling; her anger gives her a gimlet edge. Alfie Friedman’s Connor has an entirely beguiling openness. Together, they are fond. This embodiment, this remembering is itself a campaign. One that the theatre is well equipped to deliver.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Cherry Orchard ★★★★
Minority Report ★★★
Laughing Boy ★★★
The Cherry Orchard is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 22 June
Minority Report is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 18 May
Laughing Boy is at the Jermyn Street theatre, London, until 31 May
