The Cherry Orchard

Diana Rigg is deeply disappointing as Ranyevskaya, the grand lady of the house, who in Chekhov's superbly rich characterisation is at once absurd, lovable, cruel, funny and tragic.

Rigg catches almost none of the character's quicksilver variety in a performance that seems vocally constricted and emotionally muffled. Indeed, at times she and several other members of the cast are barely audible.

But Diana Rigg brings little new to Ranyevskaya. She is at her best in her denunication of Simon Scardifield's Trofimov as, in Mike Poulton's translation, "a prig, an overgrown child, a eunuch". But you never sense that this is a woman blinded to economic reality by romantic ardour, or who is, in her brother's phrase, "a bit of a slut". Without wishing to appear ungallant, both she and William Gaunt as a silver-haired Gayev also seem somewhat mature for the roles they inhabit.

Dame Diana, a bit senior to play the mother of Charlotte Riley’s teenage Anya, captures none of the comedy of Ranevskaya’s dizzy-minded romanticism or her grief-struck sense of loss — an aspect similarly missing from William Gaunt’s pompous Gayev.

Rigg's Mme Ranyevskaya is, in fact, one of this production's serious defects. As an actress, she excels at portraying formidability characters with a powerful firmness of purpose, such as Mother Courage, Medea, or the redoubtable Southern matriarch in Suddenly, Last Summer. She's great, too, at the scathing wit of ball-breakers such as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. This, though, is her first stab at Chekhov, and I'm afraid her performance suggests that mercurial distraction is not her forte, and that she should have tackled the role, if at all, around 15 years ago.

Her Ranyevskaya is far too uncomplicatedly sweet and gracious, pouring forth generosity of attention as profligately as she spills out roubles on rash tips. When she listens to others, her eyes are wide with wonder and eager concentration. But Chekhov's heroine is maddening as well as captivating liable to stray at any moment into absent-minded self-involvement, or to shift, in the instant, from grief-stricken emotion to blithely oblivious cruelty. Rigg comes across more as a straightforward victim of historical change than as a woman who, in her feckless refusal to focus on economic realities, colludes in the loss of her family seat.

I yield to nobody in my love of Diana Rigg, and her Ranyevskaya is certainly the “magnificent looking creature” described by Lopakhin, the friend and former peasant who will eventually buy her over-mortgaged mansion and cherry orchard. Throughout the evening she's sweet, outgoing, generous, too generous. She spills out warm feelings as recklessly as she does roubles. But where's the dark that should come with the light? Her heart is being inexorably drawn back to Paris, where she has left the lover who exploited her, and she ends up returning there: which clearly bodes betrayal, pain, poverty, disaster.

Chekhov regarded The Cherry Orchard as a comedy, but there's offstage tragedy to come, and Rigg gives too little inkling either of that or of the profound anguish of losing her ancestral home.

Estuaire44 a écrit:Actually, the play is a flop!