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The Cherry Orchard by Anton Checkov Chichester Festival Theatre 15th May – 7th June Directed by Philip Franks Reviewed by John Garfield-Roberts The Festival Theatre has in the past few years undergone an amazing change of fortune under the Artistic oversight of Jonathan Church, but one has the slight feeling that the past few years his programming of plays has tended to be geared more to the Sussex blue rinse than perhaps the future theatre going public which as an overall industry needs to get its act together and start reaching out to this new demographic in order to still be running in twenty years time, so it was no real surprise that once again Church’s choice of productions sit on the safe side of the fence and bringing in Old Hat names from theatre and TV to carry the shows. As a twenty something male, I was excited to see the line up of names that Church and Franks had pulled together, this is a cast on paper that you would only see on stage at the National not on the provincial stage at Chichester: Diana Rigg, Maureen Lipman, William Gaunt, Jemma Redgrave, William Gaunt, Frank Finlay – any theatre would be proud to get a line up like this confirmed, and with a line up needs a production that will showcase their talents to the full…what a shame that this excellent new adaptation by Mike Poulton just didn’t ignite the touch paper. This new production by Philip Franks is cold, flavourless and quite tepid, and remarkably a production that I will try to forget and not let it hamper my own personal liking for the text. There were some very odd decisions made …