Dozing in the orchard
The RSC has been on an astonishing run of form lately, especially when it comes to its non-Shakespearean productions; both Cyrano de Bergerac and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui are amongst the best things I’ve seen at the theatre all year. So it comes as a mild disappointment to report that Tamara Harvey’s new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is, if not a disaster, certainly something of a let-down, thanks to an underwhelming star performance, a somnolent lack of dynamism in the staging and a pervasive sense of “so what”? There is a tendency in English theatre to play down the essential strangeness of Chekhov and treat it as straw-hatted melancholy, where good chaps drink tea from the samovar and occasionally exclaim about their disappointing love lives, but this version replaces mildness with torpor, to frustrating effect.
- ▪The RSC has been on an astonishing run of form lately, especially when it comes to its non-Shakespearean productions; both Cyrano de Bergerac and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui are amongst the best things I’ve seen at the theatre all year
- ▪So it comes as a mild disappointment to report that Tamara Harvey’s new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is, if not a disaster, certainly something of a let-down, thanks to an underwhelming star performance, a somnolent lack of dy
- ▪There is a tendency in English theatre to play down the essential strangeness of Chekhov and treat it as straw-hatted melancholy, where good chaps drink tea from the samovar and occasionally exclaim about their disappointing love lives, but
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Record
| Original publisher | The Critic |
| Canonical URL | https://thecritic.co.uk/dozing-in-the-orchard/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 24 Jul 2026 06:39:23 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-24T08:27:16.277Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-24T08:27:16.277Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The RSC has been on an astonishing run of form lately, especially when it comes to its non-Shakespearean productions; both Cyrano de Bergerac and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui are amongst the best things I’ve seen at the theatre all year. So it comes as a mild disappointment to report that Tamara Harvey’s new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is, if not a disaster, certainly something of a let-down, thanks to an underwhelming star performance, a somnolent lack of dynamism in the staging and a pervasive sense of “so what”? There is a tendency in English theatre to play down the essential strangeness of Chekhov and treat it as straw-hatted melancholy, where good chaps drink tea from the samovar and occasionally exclaim about their disappointing love lives, but this version…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Critic.
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