In this raucous, arresting staging, Kristin Scott Thomas and Stephen Mangan join the ranks of those proving that Chekhov, like Shakespeare, can take rough handling. In Ian Rickson’s production of Conor McPherson’s new translation, costumes are untethered from the 1900s and language from decorum. “F***ing try me, I’ll bite your balls off,” the ancient servant Firs snaps to the arrogant valet Yasha, who’s wearing a mod-style suit and knit polo shirt.
It adds to the play’s sense of old orders decaying, norms of behaviour spinning out of control. Scott Thomas gives a twitchy, strained, rictus-smiling central performance as Ranevskaya, the adored but terminally feckless landowner who seemingly can’t bear to be in a room with herself. She’s always slipping out of embraces and tricky situations, squirreling secretive drinks.
Mangan delivers a serio-comic masterclass in timing and fretful awkwardness as the peasant turned businessman Lopakhin, and the supporting cast is impressive. The whole thing is a little rough around the edges but – like Benedict Andrews’ reworked Cherry Orchard at the Donmar in 2024, and Thomas Ostermeier’s radical Seagull with Cate Blanchett at the Barbican last year – also thrilling and refreshing.
In the scuffed nursery of a down-at-heel country estate, we first see Mangan’s Lopakhin nervously rehearse his greeting for the returning Ranevskaya. She’s back from Paris after squandering the last of her cash in a failed love affair, gathering about her a rag-tag band of family and scrounging hangers-on.
Renevskaya is admired for her beauty and her kindness, but it becomes clear that her financial and emotional largesse is a way of keeping reality at bay. The estate must be sold, yet she refuses to entertain Lopakhin’s plan to save it by building holiday dachas on the beloved orchard. In Scott Thomas’s performance, self-knowledge flickers just below the surface.
Both the future and the past loom over these characters: Peter Wight’s hopeless, sentimental Gaev (Peter Wight), Ranevskaya’s brother; the lovelorn book-keeper Yepikhodov and the tutor Trofimov, an eternal student radical. In McPherson’s version the drowning of Ranevskaya’s young son Grisha is a major factor in their nostalgic paralysis. His infant height is marked in Cyrillic script on the door frame, along with that of Ranevskaya’s biological daughter Anya (Anastasia Martin) and the adopted Varya (Vinette Robinson).
Despite the chagrin lacing the play, Chekhov described it as “a jolly comedy – a vaudeville, almost a farce”, and Rickson and McPherson duly lean into the humour. The discomfiture between Lopakhin and Varya, whom everyone assumes will marry but who are unable to connect due to his fascination with her mother, is heartbreaking but also hilarious. The two doors leading to the stairwell on Chloe Lamford’s set nod the conventions of farce.
There are pratfalls from Megan Cusack’s pert and flirty maid Dunyasha, and Shubham Saraf’s drippy Yepikhodov gets his foot stuck in a bucket. Anya’s governess Sharlotta is given an arch Germanic energy by Ruby Bentall. Firs – here played as fiercely deaf, demented and apparently having suffered a stroke by Karl Johnson – is constantly striving for the punchline of a lewd joke. When he slaps his breast, a puff of dust issues from his lapel.
On the costumes: Sharlotta wears a blouse with a mid-century print while Ranevskaya puts on various guises, from a 1930s lady traveller to peasant dress-up. The outfits of the daughters and the employees are evocative of the early 20th century without being specific, and Lopakhin’s green cotton suit wouldn’t look out of place in contemporary Soho. This, like the swearing and the use of words like “thicko”, frees Chekhov from the daintified amber in which he can be preserved.
Not every performance hits the mark squarely but Wight and Johnson are great value as always, and Martin and Robinson very moving. A word, too, for lighting designer Bruno Poet, who bathes the stage in ravishing states of chilly brilliance.
Rickson staged a limpid Seagull with Scott Thomas in 2008, and he and McPherson collaborated on a masterly but sadly Covid-halted Uncle Vanya in 2020. Here, the director, writer and a star-led ensemble come up with something more challenging and intriguing.