Chekhov's plays have fences around them and "Hands off" notices plastered all over. Think of the outrage that greeted Katie Mitchell's reworking of The Seagull, or the Wooster's Group's Chekhov deconstruction Brace Up! Similar howls may accompany Chris Goode's playful and, by the end, desperately moving reimagining of Chekhov's Three Sisters.
From the start, when the cast of five women and one man draw straws and open envelopes, we know the play is a game that is being played. What follows is 90 semi-improvised minutes in which the architecture of the play remains the same even though the walls have moved. Roles are arbitrarily assigned and just as suddenly switched. At one point there are two Natashas, at another the dialogue overlaps; there are false moustaches, ping-pong, cross-dressing and fat rabbits hopping blithely around. Sometimes nothing much happens, and it's a little boring, like life; at others it's a rush of activity. It will be different every night.
Who knows what someone who has never seen Chekhov's story of the sisters who long to leave their provincial home for the Moscow of their childhood would make of it, but for me the experience was akin to that disconcerting prickle you get with deja vu. You simultaneously know and don't know what is coming next. It shakes up your expectations, makes all your certainties uncertain; it is constantly illuminating and reordering the relationships.
Purists may shudder, and though the play is sometimes thrilling, it can also be difficult and frustrating to watch. But it is never gimmicky. For all its play on play, there is something pure about Goode's vision and the way it is realised by an extraordinary cast and a technical crew who, like the actors, must respond second by second to each other. There is even the possibility that the rabbits might burrow to Moscow and provide the sisters with a last-minute escape. On the night I was there, the final 30 minutes became so intensely taut and textured - physically, spatially, emotionally - that it felt as if these sisters were speaking directly to me, reminding me that, in both performance and life, we are all ghosts in an empty theatre, constantly performing, and forever giving up and going on.
· Until July 5. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
