“What does it mean, The Cherry Orchard?” asked Ismail, the young Tanjawi gentleman who had answered the door at Gazebo, Veere Grenney’s mountaintop estate in Tangier. He then led me down through the British interior designer’s stunningly landscaped wonderland, conjured from the rubbled disorder on the mountainside below when Grenney bought the property, in 2009.
Now a breathtaking array of artfully arranged gardens and footpaths, foliage and folly, it opened to reveal the swimming pool. Or it should have. Only a day or two before, the pool had been crossed with steel girders put in place to buttress a wooden floor, upon which the wonderland’s newest arrangement had been assembled: row upon row of garden chairs, and, behind them, the benches which made up the balcony area where Ismail and I were now sitting. The words “The Cherry Orchard” were emblazoned on a makeshift screen that hid a bit of the promontory of rocks and even more foliage at the other end of the pool, which would serve as the stage for a one-night-only charity performance of the Chekhov play.
The production was directed by Rob Ashford, with costumes and set design by Jaimal Odedra. The London cast was to include Gillian Anderson, Samuel West, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Dockery, Alison Oliver, and Penelope Wilton. That afternoon, Ismail and I were awaiting their dress rehearsal.
As the costumed actors finished their lunch, I turned to Ismail to answer his question. “The Cherry Orchard is a play about a Russian family having to let go of its beloved property to make way for a new order,” I said. “It’s about grieving for a way of life that is no more. At the end of the play, there is the heartbreaking sound of their beloved trees in the cherry orchard being chopped down. It’s ironic that the play is being done here in these surroundings, because Veere bought this property and made way himself for a new order, by creating his own version of a cherry orchard, not destroying it. Chekhov, though, is all about irony.”
The night after the dress rehearsal, the garden designer and writer Madison Cox—the widower of Pierre Bergé and current president of the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent, who, along with Ashford, has shepherded this charity weekend into being for the last decade—took the stage to welcome the audience of close to 200 guests. This year, he told us, the performance benefited the Association La Crèche de Tanger, the Association for the Fight Against AIDS, and the American Legation of Tangier.
The photographer and artist Johnny Rozsa, Grenney’s houseguest and friend, hand-painted the fans atop each program. Between the first and second acts, there was a picnic—Chekhov with checked napkins—served on the grounds of Gazebo in the manner of an evening of opera at Glyndebourne.
Among the guests were Eric Schmidt, Michèle Lamy, Hamish Bowles, Peter Morgan, Pattie Boyd, the wives of the newly appointed Republican diplomats, and the young architect Ismail Afailal, whose Brussels firm has an outpost in Tangier. Becky Paris flew in from London, where she is the head of casting for Shakespeare’s Globe theater, to see Luke Thallon, who portrayed Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company last season in Stratford-upon-Avon, play the role of Trofimov.
The dress rehearsal had been a bit rough the day before, but the performance—which the actors took on with scripts still in hand—was remarkable. It proved that theater is an alchemical art in need of a tribe, an audience, in order to come alive. Because once the actors got their first Chekhovian laugh and felt themselves being heard and seen and understood, there it was—life—an ordered assemblage of not only beauty and allure (much like Grenney’s gardens) but also longing and wit and ennui.
As midnight approached, there was a party down the torchlit mountain lane, where disco music beckoned from another walled estate, this one owned by the interior designer Jean-Louis Deniot and his partner, William Holloway, who co-founded the secondhand-furniture e-commerce Web site 1stDibs. Lots of people wearing lots of white were finding the kind of mischief one finds in Africa under a moon that still looked full but wasn’t.
I dared to go in, then realized I had no way home. Walking outside and back up the lane, I asked three tribal elders if I could hitch a ride. They kindly took me along with them and dropped me in the lower reaches of Tangier, right outside the medina, on the Grand Socco, before continuing on to some far-flung beach, where they were staying.
For all the splendor of the evening and such finely honed aesthetics of the rarefied life, it was that one rarity most of all—an act of kindness—which embodied the essence of this yearly, rather miraculous performance for one lone summer night in Tangier. There was an enchantment to it all. Privilege and privacy were its hallmarks, along with professionalism. But it was that kindness that was its reason. Kindness is why it carries on.
Kevin Sessums, who has written two New York Times best-selling memoirs, now writes the Substack column SES/SUMS IT UP. Having donated or sold all that he owned, he lives as a pilgrim throughout the world
