Kenneth Branagh was 23 when he first trod the boards at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in the title role for a 1984 production of “Henry V.” After a three-year stint at the company, he directed and starred in a major screen adaptation of the same play, which earned him two Oscar nominations and made him a household name.
Over four decades on from his debut, Branagh is back in Stratford, performing in two back-to-back productions of Chekhov and Shakespeare classics, both of which contain themes that subtly resonate with his own R.S.C. story.
“The Cherry Orchard,” which opened this week, tells of homecomings and departures, of memories bound up in place and the inexorable march of time. In a new interpretation of Chekhov’s piece by the playwright Laura Wade — directed by Tamara Harvey and running through Aug. 29 — Branagh plays the self-made entrepreneur Lopakhin, who visits the estate on which has father had toiled as a serf and urges its debt-ridden owner, Madame Ranyevskaya (Helen Hunt), to cash in her asset to ease her financial woes.
She is back at the family seat after five years in Paris and is too dreamily sentimental to entertain Lopakhin’s suggestion of tearing down her beloved orchard and building dachas in its place. As she wallows in nostalgia, he tersely implores her: “Think on it!”
Befitting the theme of roots revisited, Branagh plays Lopakhin with the thick Northern Irish accent of his own childhood in working-class Belfast. (Branagh and his family moved to England when he was 9, and he subsequently adopted an English accent.)
If his Lopakhin comes across more like a concerned bank manager than a rapacious wheeler-dealer, that’s no bad thing. His genuine care goes beyond self-interest and meets Chekhov’s stipulation (in a 1903 letter to the Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavski) that the character should be “a decent person in every sense.” Lopakhin might be an acquisitive merchant, but he is also — in this scenario at least — a voice of reason.
That’s because Ranyevskaya and her entourage are in trouble. They are trying, with poignant futility, to hold onto their dignity in straitened circumstances, quietly conveyed by the washed-out green walls and sad dust-sheets of Anna Fleischle’s set.
Their predicament is delicately rendered by a capable cast. Standouts include Bill Pullman as Ranyevskaya’s stiffly verbose and eccentrically dressed brother, Gaev (when he declares that he has “eaten through my whole fortune in sweets,” we can believe him). Guy Henry’s Pishchik is a droll, genial sponger who wouldn’t be out of place in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, and Michael Elwyn nails the doddering pathos of the aged servant Firs, who thinks the emancipation of the serfs was where it all went wrong for Russian society.
Collectively, there is something of the madhouse about them. So it’s ultimately for the best when a champagne-drunk Lopakhin stumbles onstage in the play’s climactic scene and announces, with his Belfast accent further thickened by inebriation, that the orchard has been sold at auction. Asked who bought it, he offers a drawling reply that is both triumphant and graciously sheepish: “Ayyy did!”
For most of these characters, the play’s ending represents the chance of a fresh start. In this, as in Lophakin’s rise from obscurity to prominence, we see echoes of Branagh’s early career. In his 1991 memoir, “Beginning,” he recalls shedding his Northern Irish diction to make it in the acting world, and unpacks the tensions that led him to leave the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987. His time in Stratford was professionally formative, but rocky. Branagh tangled with the management over workloads and pay, and eventually felt that he had to move on to flourish.
That decision seems to have paid off, and Branagh returned to the company this summer as a knight of the realm. There was indeed a serene, almost stately quality to his portrayal of the magus Prospero in “The Tempest,” which enjoyed a five-week run before “The Cherry Orchard” opened.
It what was Branagh’s first appearance on a Royal Shakespeare Company stage since playing Hamlet there in 1992-93, he took the stage in a magician’s cape, produced a maestro’s wand and proceeded to conduct the storm that opens the play, scattering a gaggle of shipwrecked nobles and royals onto Prospero’s enchanted island.
Here, as in “The Cherry Orchard,” Branagh’s character was the agent of change. Prospero has mastery over the island and its residents: the airborne spirit Ariel (Amara Okereke), his enslaved servant, Caliban (Ashley Zhangazha), and his daughter Miranda (Ruby Stokes). But he wields influence with a magnanimity that is both self-possessed and benign.
When Miranda, waking from a slumber, complains of “heaviness,” Branagh jiggled his hips as he playfully urged her to “shake it off!” It was a rare moment of abandon in a studiedly restrained performance.
If the acting in this production, directed by Richard Eyre, was conspicuously understated — to the point of being almost frictionless at times — it was offset by sound and visuals, with a gorgeous orange and blue set by Bob Crowley, evoking sun and sea, and costumes by Fotini Dimou.
Snatches of music from traditional West African instruments hinted at postcolonial allegory, as did the total absence of savagery in Zhangazha’s Caliban, who had all the menace of suburban accountant. The show gave him back his humanity even before Prospero set him and Ariel free in an elegantly rendered closing scene.
Branagh got on his knees to renounce Prospero’s “rough magic,” before snapping his conductor’s baton in half, tearing up his sheet music and taking his leave. The backdrop fell away to reveal the backstage area, and the spell was broken.
“The Tempest” was Shakespeare’s final play, as “The Cherry Orchard” was Chekhov’s. Juxtaposed like this, their elegiac qualities are all the more resonant, so it’s tempting to see Branagh’s return to his old stomping ground as a sentimental last hurrah. But he is only 65 — and on this evidence, he is far from done.
