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Guilt, gore and indecent lust... it’s the rite stuff!

The Cherry Orchard (Theatre Royal, Windsor) Verdict: Gandalfian magic ★★★★✩

Patrick Marmion first night review

JAMeS McArdle and Saoirse ronan descend into the underworld in one of the bleakest productions of Shakespeare’s Scottish play i can remember. Set in the very lowest of the lower depths of hell, it’s a show that turns the already sinister play into a kind of Black Mass.

to begin with, our Lord and Lady Macbeth are a hot couple, made even randier by the prospect of power. Her lust for the royal levers of Scotland is positively indecent and sees her almost panting with desire. He is less excited by the prospect of the slaughter required to get to the throne – which he thinks he’s been promised by the equivocating witches (played here by a sullen trio of older women in charcoal trouser suits).

ronan goes shamelessly to pieces in a fake meltdown in the wake of their first, most audacious killing of the King. Her husband, though, remains infirm of purpose, perhaps too full of what his missus dubs ‘the milk of human kindness’.

Slowly but surely, the pair’s vividly sexualised relationship wilts and wanes as they wade through a spectral tide of guilt and gore.

Director Yael Farber has what old lags call ‘previous’ in staging this kind of primordial extremity. Her past shows, including Salome at the National theatre, tended to be ceremonial rites and were never knowingly understated. even the title has been ostentatiously extended and this production groans with portent, like an old dog after too much dinner.

it’s played out in a Stygian perma-fog, where slices of light cast shadows as much as they illuminate. Glass screens on casters catch ghostly reflections, a dull moon hangs like a dusty clock over the stage and a ram’s skull for a crown turns Macbeth’s coronation at Scone into a satanic rite.

ADDiNG to the sepulchral mood, Aoife Burke’s cello-playing on stage carves out long, plangent groans; while tom Lane’s music further thickens the atmosphere with booming drums, an electronic throbbing, heart beats and heavy breathing.

Anything inconvenient to Farber’s infernal mission, such as the famous comic porter’s speech about knocking at the castle gates, is ditched. No room for frippery, either, unless you count McArdle’s Glaswegian lament: ‘Aye, it was a rough night.’

Like his wife, he has a colourful breakdown during which he confides in the cellist (who, last time i checked, was not meant to be part of the action). Yet the tale retains the power to genuinely disturb. the murder of Banquo (a rugged ross Anderson) sees his son returning, affectingly, to his father’s corpse.

And the butchering of MacDuff’s children had some members of the audience squirming and sliding down in their seats in an attempt not to bear witness.

For the final showdown, MacDuff (a stentorian emun elliott) lays on

to Macbeth in a sort of pro-wrestling bout, made more elemental still by the fact that the stage is now awash with water from a running tap, left on so the killers can wash the blood from their hands.

in the end, McArdle is reduced to growling and barking, while ronan’s elegant catwalk death is worthy of a perfume ad. As the Bard himself puts it, we have all ‘supped full with horrors’. Still, i wouldn’t have wanted to miss it — and although the Almeida is now sold out, some tickets remain for the online live stream (October 27-30).

AFTER the rigours of playing the whippersnapper Hamlet — a character some 60 years his junior — Ian McKellen steps into The Cherry Orchard like a pair of old slippers.

He takes the more age-appropriate (and much less challenging) role of the doddery old butler in a Russian country house — a tiny part for the 82-year-old theatrical knight in comparison to Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark. Yet even here, McKellen weaves his Gandalfian magic.

The stellar cast alongside him includes Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw, Jenny Seagrove and Robert Daws, in Martin Sherman’s lovingly wistful and quick-witted adaptation of Chekhov’s masterpiece.

Annis is Ranyevskaya, queen of a highly-strung cast of characters. Sweeping in from Paris at the start wearing fur and velvet, she swears she might die of joy — and warmly embraces a big old bookcase, to demonstrate just how happy she is to be back in the family home.

McKellen’s Firs fusses about her, chuckling quietly to himself and muttering non-sequiturs. When we first see him, sporting a big hat, he looks like a Russian Orthodox patriarch. But once the hat’s off, we see a shaven head — which with his grey hipster beard gives him the air of an antique barista.

SHAW, meanwhile, plays Ranyevskaya’s nemesis, Lopakhin: a self-made former peasant who promises to pay her debts by buying her beloved home, including the picturesque cherry orchard.

She cannot bear his plain Yorkshire ways; and his bluff pride is eventually revealed to be just a cover, hiding the simmering rage he feels at her family’s treatment of his ancestors. Shaw’s age though does complicate (for us viewers) his chemistry with Kezrena James, who plays his much younger, lovelorn admirer.

Still, The Cherry Orchard is a play that’s less about the story; and more a set of character sketches. These characters are given to rambling philosophising, emotional speculations and psychological inventories of themselves. The result is a melancholy soap opera or comedy of manners, following the Scheherazade principle that if you can only keep talking, bad things may never happen.

Daws gives a beautifully dotty turn as a Ken Dodd-ish eccentric neighbour who lives by his luck; while Seagrove plays Annis’s gasbag of a brother Gaev, not so much clinging to his youth as dodging his old age. With the other, younger characters threatening to make the same mistakes — including Alis Wyn Davies as a sybaritic servant and Ben Allen as her lofty, student admirer — Sean Matthias’s production strikes an amiably tragic tone.

It’s visually pleasing too: an old school impressionist Chekhov, with costumes and lighting supplying pastel colours, alongside parasols and Persian carpets.

Having the audience seated on the stage as well as in the auditorium allows us to feel part of the action, and to imagine these rambling, incomplete, long-gone lives to be so much like our own.

But the real feat, in a play with 15 characters vying for attention, is the directorial juggling required to keep all the balls in the air. Matthias drops none of them, and rounds off what has surely been a very happy and hugely enjoyable stay for McKellen and co in Windsor.

The Big Picture

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2021-10-15T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-15T07:00:00.0000000Z

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