Nina Hoss Says Her Role in New Adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard “Came Out of the Blue”
The actor Nina Hoss first came into my consciousness in Christian Petzold’s rapturous, sad, mysterious 2014 film Phoenix, in which Hoss gets to be at the center of one of the greatest closing scenes in recent memory. Hoss holds a small audience rapt with a song, in the process gradually revealing her true identity in devastating fashion. She’d been a rising star in her native Germany for some time, both onscreen and onstage, but Phoenix put her on the international map. As did a run as a beloved—and then bitterly mourned—spy on the American series Homeland.
Since then, Hoss has enjoyed the fruitful, peripatetic career of a true journeywoman actor, switching between languages, formats, and countries in a variety of compelling projects. Her latest is a starring role in a new adaptation of playwright Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which played to raves in London in 2024 and recently opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Hoss plays Madame Ranevskaya, the alternately shrewd and swooning matriarch of a fading aristocratic clan facing the sale of their formerly grand dacha and its attendant orchard.
To update the 121-year-old play, director Benedict Andrews has made the audience a part of the show. The house lights remain on throughout the performance, and when actors are not onstage, they sit nearby, watching the action. It makes for an intimate night at the theater, one in which regular modern-day people seem to blend in with bored and melancholy gentry from a faraway time and place. Over a recent Zoom call, I ask Hoss if there was any trepidation about Andrews’s concept when he first presented it to her.
“I think he wasn’t sure if we would all be up for really sitting in the audience watching the show every night and every matinee, and just being part of it the whole time,” Hoss says. “Luckily enough we were all up for it from the get-go. We were always in the rehearsal space, we would watch each other. Normally you go to rehearsal because it’s your scene, and then you have a little break and then you come on again. But in this case we were all in the room the whole time. With that we learned what our language would be onstage.”
It’s a striking language, one that brings Chekhov’s tragicomic depiction of shifting class structures into contemporary sociopolitical relevance. But the production doesn’t go hard on drawing those connections. “If you’re a curious and open-eyed person, you can see it in there,” Hoss says. “It’s such good writing that you don’t even have to stress it.” The primary focus of the production is, quite simply, to do something entertaining. “All of us are very aware of what’s going on in the world right now, and we know that if our character says certain things, it’s bigger than us,” Hoss explains. “Whoever catches it, that’s fantastic. And if not, it’s also okay. You can also just have a very entertaining, escapist evening with Chekhov and fall into another family’s problems and just enjoy that. But if you feel there’s a bigger, wider frame to it, you can find that.”
This Cherry Orchard also resists the temptation to turn it all into screed about spoiled rich people or to heavily indicate toward a coming revolution, which is in keeping with the spirit of the original text. “[Chekhov] was a doctor,” Hoss says. “He came from a very poor background but made it into the middle class. He was in all kinds of households, he met all sorts of people. And he found something lovable and likable in all of them. Contrary to Gorky, for example, where it’s much more political—Children of the Sun, where you feel the revolution is just knocking on the door and you think, Well, this is like the French Revolution. There will be a guillotine or something bad will happen once they leave the stage. With Chekhov, you never have that feeling. There’s always hope. He acknowledges that change is always happening, but it’s up to us how we conduct it. It’s okay to feel nostalgic, it’s okay to feel hurt. He doesn’t judge.”
A more straightforward, earnest approach to a classic text was a refreshing change of pace for Hoss, who comes from a more avant-garde theater tradition. “The German theater world is a very experimental one,” Hoss notes. “I think we pushed boundaries, from the ’70s on, quite far. So much so that sometimes I think, Can’t we just go back to telling the story and not having this big concept on top of it all?” she says with a laugh. “That’s what I really, truly appreciate about the British and American theater.”
Ranevskaya is one of the great female stage roles, one that many young actors hope to play someday. But Hoss says she doesn’t plan her career with such goalposts in mind. “I never have the thing of, ‘If I don’t play this I won’t be a fulfilled actress.’ I had one in the back of my head, which was Medea, and I’ve done it. That was a milestone for me, where I was like, Wow, okay, that’s really something. And now I can just dance.”
