The Cherry Orchard

Blink and you could miss Philip Prowse's astonishing new production of Chekhov's last play, reduced to a fast and furious 90 minutes and shaped by the playwright's comment that it should be "a comedy, not a drama - even a farce in spots".

The speediness comes from a trimmed text and a racy pace on stage: characters run, dash, and fling themselves about, underlining the sense of a fast-changing order with which a financially ruined fin-de-siècle family cannot keep up.

This aspect leads many directors to cast the play as a tragedy, but not Prowse. He isn't concerned with what is being lost, symbolised by the orchard; instead he nudges the play to look forward to the onset of the scary, bewildering new order.

As speed is part of this, the adaptation is short on languor and indulgent navel-gazing. Instead it borrows from and hints at a range of dramatic and narrative styles that would follow the play, first performed in 1904.

There are touches of expressionism, silent film, Charlie Chaplin, Keystone Cops, farce, Marlene Dietrich (particularly in Anne Marie Timoney's performance as the governess), The Wizard of Oz, Brechtian alienation and the bleakly comic despair that was Beckett's speciality.

As well as this ravishingly rich and intelligent visual context, there are some tremendous performances, most notably Tam Dean Burn as Lopakhin, the entrepreneur who has risen from a family of former serfs to buy the estate and orchard.

Burn gallops around, thrilled with the shock of his success and falling for the ruined Madame Ranevksy, played by Georgina Hale with a compelling brittle sheen.

Everyone in the cast taps into the Chekhovian view of character as a complex, often contradictory thing, an unsettling view that many avoid by playing The Cherry Orchard as straight tragedy.

In this production, each character is as shifting and unfathomable as the weather (three degrees of frost and yet a cherry tree covered in blossom in the opening scene). We may not care for any of the characters on stage, but in this audacious production the play feels as pertinent and insightful as ever.

· Until March 30. Box office: 0141-429 0022.