THEATRE
The producer and actress Gala Gordon on the ingenuity of her friend Benedict Andrews’ timeless reinterpretations of Anton Chekhov plays
It feels like returning to my theatrical roots to talk to Benedict Andrews as he prepares his new production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse.
In 2012, he cast me as Irina in a different Chekhov work, Three Sisters, at the Young Vic. The role changed my life, not only for the doors it opened professionally but because of the friendships I struck up with my stage siblings Danny Kirrane, Vanessa Kirby and Mariah Gale, and the creative comrade I gained in Andrews. The visionary, formidable Australian has a deep relationship with the capital: a few months prior to Three Sisters, he worked with Cate Blanchett to deliver a staggering performance in Big and Small, and opened Cat on a Hot Tin Roof up to new audiences with a magnetic 2017 production starring Sienna Miller and Jack O’Connell.
The Cherry Orchard is set during the turn of the 20th century: the aristocratic matriarch Ranevskaya and her family return, following exile in Paris, to their rural Russian estate to oversee its sale in order to pay their mortgage. The purchaser is the son of one of her former serfs, and the story explores the tensions and conflicts that arise as longstanding social and economic hierarchies are dramatically dismantled. Andrews hopes to bring the tale to life with his contemporary, paredback approach, similar to the one he used when we worked together. ‘I wanted to build on the discoveries that we made in Three Sisters,’ he says. ‘The concrete was exposed and the audience was illuminated by the same forensic fluorescence as the characters underneath the lightbox. In that moment, I thought, “This is what theatre is. This is what Chekhov is.”’
He feels that the themes of his new production resonate with today’s issues. ‘There is symbolism in the cherry orc
