Fresh take on Chekov

Dominic Dromgoole and his designer Rachel Blues have hit upon a brilliant design concept for Anton Chekhov's great tragi-comedy of loss and longing. The stage is literally overwhelmed with imitation cherry blossom.

Instead of walls, the cramped, nursery-room setting is decorated with vertical strips of string, like Venetian blinds, to which dabs of white cotton or cloth are attached. Three columns, like lines of cherry trees, decorate the scene and become passage ways down which the characters walk.

It becomes luminously clear how far Madam Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev have become possessed and romantically obsessed by the orchard, and the estate they must develop to keep. Trevor Fox's shrewd, humane Lopakhin expresses just the right degree of exasperated bewilderment about this refusal to face daunting reality.

Fox's performance is a good, liberating surprise too. This emotionally withdrawn Lopakhin, the businessman who has risen from peasant ranks, obeys Chekhov's instructions that the character should be dignified and intelligent and not the socially awkward arriviste-yokel of many actors' imagining.

Dromgoole's production, even though it permits an irritating variety of accents with Lopakhin a Geordie, Varya Irish, Trofimov Scottish, a Lancashire Yasha, and the clerk Yepikhodov sounding like a Radio 4 newsreader, is socially well-pointed.

The open, scathing contempt that Francis Lee's cocky man servant Yasha variously shows for Brian Protheroe's ineffectual Gaev, for the simple, smitten Dunyasha (Lucy Gaskell) and Trevor Martin's wonderful, mind-wandering Firs, is an omen of those revolutionary attitudes soon to engulf this privileged world.

Samuel Adamson's vivid new version, though saddled with some grating modernisms, lucidly captures the Slavic emotional and sexual turbulence. But too many performances are corsetted in misplaced Anglo-Saxon reserve and decorum.

In particular, Geraldine James's Ranevskaya cools the play with her downright mildness over love, loss and children, while Mairead McKinley underplays the lovelorn Varya and Mark Bonnar as the theoretical revolutionary, Trofimov, dimly rises to the romantic challenge of Jemma Powell's seductive Anya. This is Chekhov cleverly revalued, but without more than a hint of Eros.

Until 28 June. Box office: 020 8237 1111.

The Cherry Orchard