Anxiety and agitation failing to translate into action as an exhausted and exhausting world faces an uncertain future – the contemporary relevance of The Cherry Orchard requires no special pleading. Retaining the characters and narrative trajectory of the play written by Anton Chekhov in 1903, Australian director Benedict Andrews employs music and contemporary diction in an ambitious production that takes the humour in Chekhov’s final play seriously. It features Nina Hoss, the German star of stage and screen, as Madame Ranevskaya, the owner of the estate containing the titular cherry orchard.

At the outset, the audience in the intimate 250-capacity Donmar Warehouse is unsure when the production actually begins. The actors sat among them, and the house lights shine for most of the two-and-a-half-hour production. In the age of franchise movies and sequels, stars no longer sell Hollywood films as they once did. Theatre, by contrast, has become ever more reliant on casting faces familiar from the television or cinema. Attracted to the symbolic capital of theatre, box-office stars are not always willing to do the preparatory work required of stage acting (Kristin Scott Thomas seemed woefully unrehearsed at the beginning of a 2007 run of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Royal Court). This can result in supporting casts having to do the heavy lifting. But no such rallying around to cover the cracks was required here, with no weak link in Andrews’ gender- and race-neutral ensemble. Hoss shines, without overshadowing her fellow actors on a stage left bare beyond the adornment of oriental carpets on the floor and rear wall.

The play – ostensibly set in the present – opens with the inhabitants of the rural estate preparing for the return of the aristocratic but financially beleaguered Ranevskaya from Paris. Anyone unfamiliar with Chekhov’s text will assume that Andrews has undergone a more radical overhaul than is the case. References to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek or the Anthropocene provide contemporary equivalents to the mention of Nietzsche or the playwright’s prescient concerns about the destruction of nature in the original play. Chekhov, without being pious, reflects ethically on the changing world. This balance, lost in many productions, relies on extracting comic as well as tragic mileage from characters as prone to philosophical procrastination as they are incapable of decision making. As the eternal student Trofimov, the Australian-born Daniel Monks, rants about the evils of capitalism and the imminence of global catastrophe. He is both right and deluded: too preoccupied to fall in love, his priggish righteousness is used to keep emotion and sentiment at bay. Andrews and actor Michael Gould milk the comic potential of Gaev, a child trapped in a middle-aged body, addressing a bookcase as if it were a person. Gould invites a member of the audience on stage to take on the role of the inanimate piece of furniture.

In his 2012 production of Three Sisters at the Young Vic, Andrews had the eponymous siblings listening to and performing songs by grunge-band Nirvana. Early on in The Cherry Orchard, Nick Cave’s ‘Easy Money’ is played off-stage. At the end of Act Two, Ranevskaya gives money she can ill afford to an inebriated beggar. In the current climate, many practitioners would cut a scene featuring a character who makes one solitary appearance in the play. The Donmar, one of London’s most reasonably priced theatres, is, however, relatively impervious to austerity in the arts. Andrews casting a blonde child with an angelic voice as the wandering beggar brings the first half to an uncanny and disconcerting close.

David Ganly as Boris Simeonov Pishchik and Sarah Amankwah as Charlotta (photograph by Johan Persson)

After the interval, music plays an increasingly dominant role, emphasising the vaudeville comedy at the heart of the play. Members of the audience are cajoled into dancing with the actors at a party on the estate, where musicians appear on-stage. Expectations are later confounded by Nathan Armarkwei Laryea launching into a beautifully tender rendition of Will Oldham’s plaintiff ‘I See a Darkness’. Up to this point, there has been nothing in the behaviour of his character, the opportunistic and loutish Yasha – who seduces the naïve and socially ambitious aspiring servant Dunyasha and mocks octogenarian servant Firs (‘what’s kicking, wrinkles’) – to suggest he is capable of such heartfelt emotion.

Lighting design and having the actors move around the auditorium rather than disappear off-stage requires them to remain in character throughout (only during the curtain call did I realise that June Watson, who played Firs, doesn’t have major mobility issues). It also incorporated the response of different spectators – the majority of whom were engrossed albeit with a visible minority dozing off – into the performance.

Attention was at its maximum early in the second half of the play, when land speculator Lopakhin (like Chekhov himself, the son and grandson of men born into serfdom) celebrates his triumph over the old aristocracy by purchasing the old estate, whose cherry orchard he intends to destroy in order to build summer apartments and maximise profits.

It is no coincidence that the play’s most financially successful character is also its most energetic. This does not render him immune to maudlin self-reflection, especially when he drinks. The ability to perform as if inebriated, nursing a bottle and bleeding wound, confirms Adeel Akhtar as a major talent. Central to the humanity of Chekhov and Andrews alike is the ability to recognise ridiculous character traits without reducing them to caricature.

Tearing up the carpets to reveal a stage stripped bear was an effective stage metaphor for the stripping away of anachronistic class privilege. With music substituting for the musicality of Chekhov’s original dialogues, the replacement of poetry with profanity worked for as long as the audience was engaged in the mini-dramas of individual characters and scenes. It was less successful in Act Four when, following the changing of the guard, characters bid farewell to the estate and each other (apart from Firs, who is inadvertently left behind). The use of coarse colloquial expressions throughout (‘fuckwit’, ‘no shit, Sherlock’, ‘spare prick at an orgy’) was instrumental to the dynamism as well as to the humour of individual scenes but resulted in a difficult transition to the non-comic ending, left strangely bereft of poetry or pathos once the music had stopped. This was a rare misstep given that so much of what had gone before suggested that Andrews’s The Cherry Orchard might turn out to be the London theatrical event of 2024.

The Cherry Orchard continues at the Donmar Warehouse in London until 22 June 2024. Performance attended: 18 May.