UK Theatre Network

It seems only fitting that the Lyceum should finish its season with Chekhov’s final play. After all 2010 is the 150th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth and Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre recently staged Three Sisters, the third of the playwright’s four great plays, so it seems like good planning for the Lyceum to complete the series with The Cherry Orchard. That said this production is no mere intellectual exercise. Byrne’s bold Scottish adaptation, coupled with Tony Cownie’s 1979 vision for the play, make it different from the hallowed versions of Chekhov we’re used to seeing. Different in a good way, that is.

In terms of the plot, the production remains close to the original: a land-owning widow (Mrs Ramsay-Mackay) and her family are swamped by debt and face the loss of their ancestral home with its beloved cherry orchard, until a local businessman (Malcolm McCracken) proposes a commercial venture that will allow them to save face. So far, so Chekhov, only the action is transported from Russia to the Highlands. This is an inspired parallel given both locations share a sense of romantic idealism, perfectly captured in Michael Taylor’s set, complete with its full-length faux Raeburn portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The family’s idealism is also a rich source of comedy in Chekhov as he sends up the aristocrats, most obviously the widow’s brother, who can even wax lyrical about  the nobility of a bookcase that  has ‘served the family’.  While this comedy translates well into the Scottish version, with the brother, Guy Ramsay, as the archetypal toff, Byrne really comes into his own with his mastery of local dialect, especially in curses and put downs, for example, the servant Fintry on a broken coffee pot: ‘bloody hoor of a thing!’. Meanwhile Grant O’Rourke is hilarious as the accident prone Sorley Shanks.     

That said the play does not shy away from the harsh politics at the heart of Chekhov’s ‘comedy’, when post-Revolutionary Russia saw the rise of the middles classes in direct opposition to the gentry. Instead it transports us to a time of equally significant social change in Scotland’s recent history. Setting the action at the start of Thatcher’s reign, a time still fresh in Scottish memory, when ambition was rewarded and notions of community and local industry thwarted, Cownie ensures we are shown both sides of the story.

On the one hand we admire the ambitious McCracken, who has been successful, despite the odds. We also empathise with his frustration towards the Ramsay-Mackays, who refuse to even acknowledge their financial downfall, let alone listen to his solution. It has even been suggested McCracken’s character is a self-portrait of Chekhov, himself a victim of his father’s squandering and subsequently a self-made man.

On the other hand, the play also accommodates a more sympathetic view of the Ramsay-Mackays. Even McCracken does not place himself in direct opposition to them. This psychological complexity is expertly gauged by the actor Andy Clark, especially in the scene where McCracken tries to comfort Mrs Mackay, almost admitting  his own solution is harsh, however practical. Perhaps this again reveals Chekhov in McCracken, showing the playwright’s own ambivalence towards the declining aristocrats, especially given he was dying as he wrote the play. Indeed however eccentric and amusing the idle rich are shown to be, we are also made to face how devastating the loss of their home is to their sense of identity. They don’t know who they are anymore and we feel for them, not least due to Maureen Beattie’s exquisitely sensitive portrayal of Mrs Mackay.

In fact the entire cast is very impressive. Predominantly RSAMD trained, each actor makes an impact through Chekhov’s typically anti-star structure in which there are no lesser roles. Indeed it is the production itself that sparkles, reviving the classic play with contemporary relevance and humour, making Chekhov’s concern that his writing was too specific to have relevance outside Russia impossible to believe.

Felicity Thomson

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, adapted by John Byrne, directed by Tony Cownie

The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

16th April- 8th May 2010