Not so much a cherry orchard, more a crab-apple grove. Director Katie Mitchell makes Chekhov’s play look more shadowy, more alarming than most productions. The palette is muted, yet a sense of catastrophe hovers throughout.
Mitchell is not a director to whom you would turn expecting traditional dapple, languor – or exuberant comedy – and you don’t get it. Yet she – and Simon Stephens’s swift, invigorating, outspoken new version of The Cherry Orchard – finds something else in Chekhov. They show action skewed by varieties of grief, a grief which is driving people dotty. Some characters are on the point of losing their house, some their lovers, and one his very life.
Never has the old house, on the point of being taken over by new money, looked so palpably uncomfortable. It is for large stretches lit only dimly. When the shutters are opened they are cranked up laboriously to the noise of a mighty mechanism on its last legs. The family huddle together in a corner, as if for warmth.
The famous unexplained noise that suddenly rings out – a strange twang that sends a warning shiver through the gathering – is not, as so often, a distant sound that could almost be an illusion. It is quite literally a power cut, a seismic event which brings in darkness. It makes the characters shake and it shocks spectators. That’s unusual – and welcome – in Chekhov.
• The Cherry Orchard runs at the Young Vic, London SE1 until 29 November
