Theatre review: The Cherry Orchard (RSC/Swan)

Kenneth Branagh has a long history with the RSC: Playing Hamlet there; not getting the Artistic Director job; starting a petition to ban anyone who didn't go to RADA from ever being employed there (probably.) Now he's reunited with something else he left behind decades ago: His Belfast accent, as he plays Chekhov's representative of a rising new monied middle class in The Cherry Orchard. SirKenBran's Lopakhin is a voice of brutal pragmatism in a world of aristocratic old romantics who've not quite got to grips with the new Russia that's been growing up around them ever since the serfs were emancipated. Madame Ranyevskaya (Helen Hunt) has just been on a European tour with her daughter Anya (Chumisa Dornford-May,) where she's been spending cash liberally, cheerfully ignoring the fact that her family's fortune is long gone.In fact she returns to the ancestral country home just in time for it and all the surrounding estates to be put up for auction, just to pay the debts. Lopakhin, a…