"The Cherry Orchard: A Hundred Years of Misunderstanding" reads the programme; and this production will surely not clarify matters. Chekhov wrote it as "comedy, in places even a farce", but there are so many overlapping and contradictory impulses in Patrick Mason's staging that the overriding impression is one of Beckett-like absurdism. Clara Simpson's full-blown bonkers Charlotta emerges as its emblematic figure - chomping on celery, tossing out vaudevillian one-liners, and engaging with no one else on stage.
Tom Murphy's translation is where the mixed messages start: it stays close to the structure, themes and setting of Chekhov's original (names and internal references clearly place us in late 19th-century Russia), and yet is written in a terse, colloquial style that feels contemporary. It sounds best coming out of the mouths of the characters who are most out of touch with reality, such as Charlotta. But all the characters seem locked in their own bubbles, playing in different acting styles and not relating much to each other - nor to Joe Vanek's stark set, worn green walls with a few chairs and set pieces scattered about.
Donna Dent looks ravishing and plays Ranyevskaya with straightforward, romantic earnestness, while Nick Dunning so camps up Gayev's dreaminess that it comes off as pretension. This disparity means there is little sense of how brother and sister enable each other to ignore the looming disaster of the loss of their estate. Most of the other performances fall into the two camps of earnest-naturalistic or OTT. Alison McKenna hits an excellent balance as a highly-strung but credible Varya. Lorcan Cranitch delivers by far the evening's best performance as Lopakhin, but the character's clarity and ironic self-awareness doesn't make much sense in the context: we get little sense of how his practicality has developed both in response to and despite Ranyevskaya and Gayev's fecklessness.
· Until March 13. Box office: 00 353 1 878-7222.
