THE CHERRY ORCHARD:

'One of the productions greatest strengths is undoubtedly its visual presentation. Anna Fleischle’s set is both beautiful and understated, capturing the faded grandeur of the once bold and proud household without detracting from the action. The changing seasons are suggested with a certain elegance, with the atmospheric lighting gradually transforming the stage from an open, whitewashed domestic space into something far more melancholy. Together, these design elements give the audience the evocative sense of a soon-to-be obsolete order slipping away into history, which has a real charm.'

Theatre & Tonic

'In Tamara Harvey's production for the RSC, Anna Fleischle's bleached, shadowy set provides a stunning evocation of the fading world the Ranyevsky family are barely inhabiting. There is an ache on stage before a single word is uttered: memories are covered with dust sheets, echoes of lives have been tidied into packing chests. The colour palette is redolent of the vanishing imperial order, and although it is set a full 13 years before the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, the sadness of a world already lost hangs in the air. Skeletons of cherry trees climb the auditorium, scaffolding the house but imprisoning its occupants.

It is a cage from which Madame Ranyevskaya cannot escape, no matter how often or how far away she runs. Because what she cannot evade are the memories that haunt her: the good and the bad. Now, following a five-year sojourn in Paris, she is back in her homeland – a homeland that has already become a mausoleum to the fragmented recollections of the past in which she and her charming, feckless brother wallow.'

BROADWAY BABY

'If Anna Fleischle’s set doesn’t convey the orchard’s renowned grandeur, it is wonderfully freighted with memory. Blots of watercolour create a suggestive outline on a gauzy back wall. It is faded and fading; a vision wrenched from and dissolving into the past. Either side, trees wrap around columns like children clinging to their mother’s leg, willing her not to leave them.'

The Observer