The Winter's Tale
The Cherry Orchard
Ambitious is a word that goes with the Bridge Project like strawberry jam goes with scones. Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes have created a transatlantic repertory company performing back-to-back classics. Their opening double production at the Old Vic pairs The Winter's Tale with Tom Stoppard's new version of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.
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The thematic link isn't laboured. A discreet back-projected quote from Richard II - "O call back yesterday, bid time return" - draws the parallel; then the plays stand on their own.
Spacey and Mendes have given their production of The Winter's Tale a late-Victorian/Edwardian setting, using the Anglo-American cast to make Sicilia English and Bohemia American. But an abstract set and spookily atmospheric sound design cast the play in a magical half-light.
What a really weird play The Winter's Tale is. The first half is a full-tilt tragedy squashed into half the space, a mash-up of tropes from Oedipus Rex, Lear and Othello. Then there's a comic/bucolic interlude of unimpeachable silliness. Then, at the last, deus ex machina and arbitrary redemption. It's a mess. But it's a mess that left me with tears in my eyes.
As Leontes, the Sicilian king convinced in the face of all the evidence that his wife is schtupping his brother, Simon Russell Beale exhausts superlatives. Sinead Cusack's Paulina is righteously, thrillingly shrewish, and as the wronged Hermione, Rebecca Hall goes from edible to pitiable with magnetic effect.
The pastoral interlude in Bohemia might as well be a different play. All vulgar line-dancing and bearded Yankee yokels, it looks and plays like a lost scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou? Ethan Hawke chews up the scenery splendidly as the trickster Autolycus: now a ragged troubadour in Woody Guthrie mode, now camply bitchy, now, oddly, looking like Gary Oldman in Dracula.
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When the gimcrack plot unravels and we meet Leontes again, Beale makes piercingly persuasive this man who has spent 16 years living with an unbearable shame. Hall gives good statue. And in case you were wondering, the bear - star of the most famous stage direction in history - gives exceptionally good bear.
Viewed on the same day, The Cherry Orchard is technically excellent, but slightly underpowered emotionally by contrast with its knockout predecessor. Was it the pre-harrowed audience or the pre-harrowed actors? The transatlantic cast also presented problems. In The Winter's Tale, the accents could be rationalised geographically. But a play all about class is harder to make sense of if some of your cast are speaking in effectively classless American accents. And as Lopakhin, the nouveau-riche peasant who ends up seeing off the debt-mired toffs whose ancestors owned his ancestors, Beale lets a hint of Brummie creep into his accent.
Lopakhin, in this production, is the play's centre of gravity. His half adoring, half resentful relationship with Cusack's childishly distracted Ranevskaya is nuanced and full of pathos. You feel for him - more, in fact, than you feel for Ranevskaya. That's clever, because it gives a universal inflection to a play embedded in a particular moment in Russia's social history.
The supporting cast is strong in both plays. Tobias Segal stands out with winningly manic turns in both productions. The Cherry Orchard slightly suffers from clown fatigue, however: in addition to Segal pratfalling all over the shop, there's Dakin Matthews as Simeonov-Pishchik, making like a narcoleptic Marquess of Bath, Paul Jesson as Gaev, spouting windy nonsense, and the traditional comic business with the deaf butler. Stoppard's script updates the play efficiently, without being too showy. He doesn't try to make Chekhov Stoppardian, which is nice, because he isn't. This is a fine production, but The Winter's Tale has it by a (bear's) nose.