The Cherry Orchard review: Kristen Scott Thomas shines in Chekhov's ar-bore-al elegy

Confession: I have always found Chekhov to be mind-numbingly boring. Yes, he’s one of the greatest writers of all time, fine, but his tales of faded aristocracies and undignified urbanisation always feel a little mannered and finely wrought: too much water in the watercolour; Tennessee Williams without the sun or the sex.

So Ian Rickson had his job cut out for him should he want to cure The Cherry Orchard of its anaemia. It is, after all, a play that requires the audience to take a vested interest in whether or not a family choose to build a summer house in their back garden. His new production at the Harold Pinter Theatre, with a fresh script from Conor McPherson, attempts to liven up affairs a little – the cast speak in their native accents, there are occasional profanities, at one point a character says ‘whatsup, Grandpa?’ – but Chekhov isn’t meant to be thrilling; he’s meant to meditate on human infallibility, or something.

Fortunately, this production has a not-so-secret weapon in Kristin Scott Thomas. It is practically impossible for the Slow Horses star, one of our greatest actresses, to be boring. She is simply magisterial as the play’s heroine, Ranevskaya, whose noblesse oblige and charismatic facade belie a woman tortured by the drowning of her young son. Scott Thomas, who won an Olivier for her collaboration with Rickson on The Seagull in 2007, plays a woman ‘allergic to feeling’, pilled-up and numb, but constantly at risk of her agony breaking through – the moment before she rips up a telegram from an ex-lover from her bohemian escape in Paris, the moment she is startled by her son’s former tutor, the moment she realises she has hallucinated her mother among the trees of the family’s cherry orchard.

Ah, yes, the cherry orchard. It means God, it means the decay of aristocracy, it means the legacy of serfdom, it means industrialisation, et cetera, et cetera. Ranevskaya returns to her decaying family estate (a suitably drab and mouldy design by Chloe Lamford, gorgeously lit by Bruno Poet, who conjures the glow of golden hour just as artfully as the sun emerging after rain) to find it financially unsustainable. Who can save the family legacy but Lopakhin, the striving local businessman whose family grew up ‘owned’ by Ranevskaya and her parents. Why not, he suggests, sell the land and build some holiday homes? The railway is coming, after all. Stephen Mangan is marvellous in the role, perfectly capturing a man bowed by the realisation that money can’t buy class but class can’t pay the mortgage. He is fidgety, striving, and attempts to exert a very studied charm.

Indeed, none of the cast is bad. Most are very good, but The Cherry Orchard is mostly made up of dithering elderly aristos taking it in turns to stare offstage and monologue about some tragic event in their past that happens to be conveniently symbolic of a wider social change – the shift from the world of ballrooms and admirals to postal clerks and train timetables. This story then ends with a bathetic joke, generating a knowing laugh from the audience. Rinse and repeat. The most dramatic moments of the play – the family leaving behind their home, Lopakhin’s frustrated romance with Varya (a compelling Vinette Robinson) – feel strangely muted, as cold as the chilly nursery where the entire action is set.

At one point, Lopakhin is reminded that ‘most people find talking about money all the time boring.’ Chekhov considered The Cherry Orchard a comedy, but by Act Two the muttering interjections and wispy anecdotes left me wishing this wasn’t one of the few plays where he doesn’t use the gun from Act One.