It is initially hard to fathom where Benedict Andrews’ conspicuously kooky take on Anton Chekhov’s final drama is going. Actors come on looking like modern-day eccentrics and festivalgoers rather than Russian aristocrats of an ancient regime giving way to the new.
They swear, vape and address us directly as they play out the fate of a bored, profligate landed family led by a glamorous matriarch, Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss), who returns home from her Parisian misadventures to continue the party, despite growing debt and the prospective sale of her centuries-old estate.
We stand in for props, too, on Magda Willi’s otherwise empty stage. One audience member is referred to as a side table, another a bookcase. It is supremely off-the-wall, not least because a garish carpet is wrapped all around the auditorium, making it look like a Russian drawing room that has been put through a surreal, Alice in Wonderland blender. Is this weird, immersive, audience-participation Chekhov?
Kind of, but rather than careering into an almighty misfire, Andrews’ production gradually builds to reveal its grand, devastating vision. An auditorium that never goes dark implicates us in the drama: we might be the family’s observing guests or the impoverished peasant interlopers who have taken up home in their estate.
As a drama of the Russian revolution foretold, the family show wilful blindness to their own perilous state even when Lopakhin (Adeel Akhtar), the “new money” merchant of peasant stock, suggests a way out of the fix. It is still a story about masters, peasants and the legacy of serfdom, but the anxiety over wealth, class and dispossession is powerfully felt to be ours too.
Hoss and Akhtar, both better known for their screen work, are tremendous. Hoss has a naturally aristocratic air and plays the vulnerability of her character off against her self-regarding, puerile entitlement, though you feel for her intensely as she relapses into grief over the memory of her drowned son, and wails when the estate slips out of her hands. Akhtar is an angry Del Boy with a blingy gold watch, whose initial chippiness builds to a volcanically angry triumph over those who ruled his forefathers.
Eternal student Trofimov (Daniel Monks) is not so much a would-be revolutionary as a barefoot zealot, though not so satirised that you stop believing in his idealism. His outbursts over systemic inequality segue into our world of austerity, broken health care, library closures and the impervious “1%”, in a way that feels real rather than forced.
Ancillary characters are idiosyncratic, comic and silly, but become more human, from Sarah Amankwah’s melancholic governess to Nathan Armarkwei Laryea’s bored manservant and Posy Sterling’s aspirational maid.
The second half brings more curveballs: song, a smoke machine and a live band on stage. Again, the seeming whimsy turns into something altogether more emotionally penetrating. It changes the pace too, slower and moodier now, but delicately balanced with notes of dread in the lead up to news of the estate’s outcome.
It is devastating when it comes but then the tone shifts again, hitting every beat of Chekhov’s blend of light and dark. We see how this idle, dissolute family is wilfully blind to the pain and poverty that remains mostly invisible in this production. There is a brilliant scene when a child beggar comes calling. Yet the scale of their loss is still felt at the end. It is not so much tragicomic as comedy and then absolute tragedy.
At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 22 June
