Just before dress rehearsal, the former groundswoman of a garden makeover reality TV show is to be found stalking the ramparts of the green room at Wellington’s Circa Theatre dressed in a winter jumper and trailing a long white Victorian petticoat.
Actress Ginette McDonald, known fondly to television viewers as the impish work-shy host of Ground Force, has the task of cutting Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard down to size for a contemporary New Zealand audience.
The play may have been translated into Kiwi speech patterns (by Stuart Young) to make it more accessible, but rest assured that Lyn of Tawa, that indomitable ambassadress of New Zild speak and enduring alter ego of McDonald, has not been allowed to wrap her laughing gear round this classic text. McDonald is aware that Madame Ranevskaya is considered the Everest of female acting roles.
The trouble with the dialogue in The Cherry Orchard, McDonald has discovered, is that it looks deceptively manageable on the page, and probably is to the purists, but Chekhov is the master of subtext.
“The American playwright David Mamet says that this play is entirely about sex, but I think it’s about pride, real estate and sex.
“In this play everyone fancies everyone else, but they don’t say what they mean, so people are hostile to each other while not necessarily harbouring hostile thoughts.”
And there’s the all-consuming sartorial problem of all that internalising of thoughts and desires, which can be tricky while wearing full corsets.
“Talk about bodice rippers, my goodness me – you’re terribly hot and hormonal and heaving the bosoms away inside these costumes and you just long to tear the things off and get on with it.”
Although McDonald protests about the difficulties of both internalising and projecting at the same time, her performance has already been rated by one theatre critic (the Dominion Post’s Laurie Atkinson) as her personal best.
She self-deprecatingly describes her acting style as “sort of seat of my pants” and cringes at the memory of the first rehearsal when the merchant Lopakhin tells the cash-stretched Madame R to “cut down the tree” and divide the land up for holiday homes for the middle classes.
“I majestically rose to my feet, breathed heavily through the sinuses, flared my nostrils and yelled ‘CUT IT DOWN!’ and everybody fell about laughing because I was like something out of a Victorian melodrama.”
The actors have had to move right away from that tradition and McDonald envies the naturalism that actor Jeffrey Thomas, who plays Lopakhin, so effortlessly brings to the role.
“He has a beautiful voice which simply allows the audience to interpret and I can but follow in his Welsh wake.”
McDonald partly blames the diminishing audience tolerance for any language perceived to be difficult on the banal utterances going down on reality TV shows or soap operas, “where merely saying the lines has become acceptable”.
“As a consequence, anything dramatic has become incredibly old-fashioned sounding.”
The Cherry Orchard is also gravid with pauses where people reflect on their mortality, which makes McDonald wonder what modern every-nano-second-catered-for audiences will think, “when the thing appears to have ground to a halt”.
There is also the difficulty for a contemporary Western audience to relate to a feudal society, which for centuries had serfs.
“This play is written at a time when the natives were definitely getting restless and there are incredible conflicts between my character and Lopakhin, who has money and power but whose father was a serf.”
In contrast, the shabby, genteel Ranevskaya and her brother Gayev are cash poor and live in a dream world, unable to face up to the realities or realty confronting them.
The play will resonate with those New Zealanders concerned about the power and ethics of developers and land development because, as McDonald points out, “there is something so vulgar about carving up a beautiful meadow – I’m with Chekhov on that one”.
However, she hopes she would be more realistic than Ranevskaya, though she likes her character, summing her up as “complex, vulnerable, selfish, very flawed, hopefully charming but emotionally all over the shop”.
McDonald manages to bend her mind to this greatest of roles without resorting to method acting, a practice she deplores. She opts instead for identifying traits in herself and “bringing what intellect you have to the part rather than go to the character and become it.
“Sometimes I think, who am I kidding? Because I imagine myself a normal woman who goes to the theatre, does the job, then puts on her coat and goes home.”
McDonald is, of course, far from normal – she is as iconic as Fred Dagg and constantly fighting her own stereotype.
“I suppose I’m very flattered that I’m so closely associated with Lyn of Tawa, but I’m a very hard act to get over.”
There are certain people, she finds, who will forever think of her as some kind of Cliff Richard-like ageing soubrette vaudeville turn, but the CV shows that she is a woman of many parts.
Apart from popping up regularly in dramas, documentaries and televised debates, she has been a producer of television, a job she adored but which has temporarily been denied her, and has been acting in the theatre since she was 14 years old.
But back to the part, which Chekhov apparently wrote for his mistress, one Olga Knipper, an actress in the Moscow Theatre. McDonald has had to make a conscious effort to stop feeling “all colonial and raw” and turn her mind to the vastness of the Russian homeland, the dramatic changing of seasons and the symbolism of the cherry tree bursting forth with new life.
“It absolutely appeals to me. I remember being around Russian immigrants when I was growing up and they were always singing dreary-sounding songs, but the more dreary the song the more joyful and perky seemed to be the lyric.”
Earlier in the year McDonald played an Italian wartime prosecutor for a television drama series and magpied a souvenir from that gig.
“They gave me false fingernails and I kept them on till they fell off in the bath. I rather fancied Madame R as having long fingernails. So, after years of pretending that my hands just weren’t there, I’ve got nails of my own now and made them part of her.”
The other thing McDonald acquired in rehearsals was the art of what she describes as “safe touching”.
“When I was young I lived in London and no one touched anyone. If you wanted to be touched, you had to go to bed with someone.” On a trip to Poland, she vividly remembers getting off the train and immediately being enfolded in giant Slavic arms, with the hugging and kissing not stopping till she arrived back in London, where it was noticed how much more demonstrative she was.
“This play is such a cuddly play. Everyone’s always touching everyone else, but not in a spooky way.
“The other day I found myself seizing the wardrobe woman and hugging her round the neck, but I think she thought I was trying to throttle her.
“I’ll have to work on my technique, but I rather enjoy it. It’s not to be feared, you know.”
The Cherry Orchard is reviewed on p48.