The Cherry Orchard (Old Vic, 8th August 2009)
I think that the Bridge Project has been extremely interesting. I saw The Winter’s Tale at the start of the summer and The Cherry Orchard at the end. The two productions kind of top and tailed my London season. I had thought that the RSC might have made more connections between their productions of The Winter’s Tale and As You Like it, but as I wrote earlier in this blog, the company split the ensemble into two companies and the productions became two discrete productions. It felt, when watching The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard, that Sam Mendes had considered how the two plays might work together. On entering the auditorium The Cherry Orchard, the above quote from Richard II greets the audience. There are similarities between the sets used for the both the Bridge Project plays and ideas of loss and regret are played out in both plays. In The Cherry Orchard, I felt that the company worked really well together with some really good performances from Rebecca Hall, Simon Russell Beale, Ethan Hawke and Sinead Cusack.
Reviews and Previews
Julie Raby 