The Winter's Tale

The Cherry Orchard

Simon Russell Beale, Leontes in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, prowled a candlelit stage in a black waistcoat at 2.05pm, sipping brandy and giving sideways glances at the wife he believed was having an affair with his old friend. At 9.40pm Sinéad Cusack, Ranevskaya in Tom Stoppard’s breezy translation of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, gave a pained look at the home she was forced to leave. It was a long day for Sam Mendes’s troupe and for those spectators there from first to last — but a promising British beginning for the Bridge Project.

Mendes’s Bridge Project aims to throw a creative pontoon across the Atlantic. His company is half-British, half-American, and both his present productions played in Brooklyn’s Academy of Arts before coming to our Old Vic. But the bridge that mattered yesterday was the one invisibly built over the footlights — and both plays kept the audience rapt with their tales of loss and waste, nowhere more than in the first half of The Winter’s Tale.

One had expected the accents to be a problem, but that isn’t the case in The Winter’s Tale, because Leontes’s Sicilia is English and Polixenes’s Bohemia American. The cast of The Cherry Orchard is of mixed nationality, yet here too neither the voices nor the acting styles grate. I have to add that the British get the best roles and, on the whole, perform better. The main American stand-out is Ethan Hawke, ebullient, sly and malicious as the conman Autolycus and, whether posing as a balladeer, a courtier or a snake-oil salesman, he’s a self-enraptured master of disguise.

The opening hour is riveting. That’s thanks partly to Rebecca Hall, who is warm, affectionate but also magnificently defiant as the wrongly accused Hermione, but mainly to Russell Beale as her jealous husband. His Leontes gets the disgust, the frantic anger, the obsessive horror — you believe he feels “goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps” — but also the grief and pain inside the paranoia.

The reconciliation is genuinely moving, but the intervening acts aren’t my idea of pastoral. This is an Edwardian-era production, yet Bohemia takes one to Oklahoma or even to a hoedown in Oklahoma! — and, though Michael Braun makes an appealing Florizel for Perdita to love, Morven Christie doesn’t have the radiance the girl herself needs.

Christie is also Leontes’s doomed son Mamillius, who here gets more than the usual emphasis, with Russell Beale’s manic rage waking the boy as he lies in bed and pulverising him as he droops in a wheelchair. And here’s something that links the two plays, because Ranevskaya too has lost a son, and that adds to the baffled melancholy that deepens and darkens a performance otherwise notable for its loose-limbed sensuality and generosity of spirit. Cusack is superb — and Russell Beale excellent as the peasant-turned-tycoon Lopakhin.

Cusack is also wonderfully strong as Hermione’s protector, Paulina, and Paul Jesson impressive as Ranevskaya’s brother, the overage infant Gaev. But Russell Beale catches Lopakhin’s mix of self-admitted vulgarity, unconscious sensitivity, half-acknowledged love for Ranevskaya herself and, at one memorable moment, bewilderment at the folly of his world and life. I wouldn’t say yesterday was wholly his day. But he dominated it.

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