The Cherry Orchard, Young Vic

Ghosts are walking at the Young Vic. Katie Mitchell’s stark, startling production of Chekhov’s final lament is not just an evocation of a lost era, but a summoning of the spirits haunting Vicki Mortimer’s chilling sepulchral mansion. This is a Cherry Orchard cast into shadow – literal and figurative – but pulsing with furious energy. The past will not go gentle into that good night; it calls out in a keening cry.

At just one hour 50, Simon Stephens’ taut adaptation combines elegy with economy. The stripped-back text suits Mitchell’s absolute clarity of purpose, although the excised repetition does deprive us of the agonising experience of witnessing the family sleepwalking to disaster over a languid summer’s cyclical denial. Salvation is always an illusion in a world this bitingly bleak.

Debt-laden aristo Ranevskaya (Kate Duchêne) is suffused with grief long before facing the loss of her ancestral estate and its precious cherry orchard, mourning her drowned son in visceral paroxysms. His enshrined nursery is a constant reminder of fatal consequences: his death occurred while Ranevskaya was embarking upon a profligate affair. Yet Chekhov deftly captures the gulf between awareness of harmful behaviour and ability to diverge from it – delivered with urgent resonance by Stephens.

Equally self-destructive are Ranevskaya’s brother Leonid (Angus Wright), futilely clinging to outmoded snobbery, and her daughters, diffident Varya (Natalie Klamar, pictured above) and fervid Anya (Catrin Stewart), pursuing ill-fated romance with socially mobile businessman Lopakhin (Dominic Rowan) and eternal student Trofimov (Paul Hilton) respectively. Housemaid Dunyasha (Sarah Ridgeway) is wooed by bumbling clerk Yepikhodov (Hugh Skinner), but is drawn inexorably to predatory, callous servant Yasha (Tom Mothersdale).

Although possessed of wry wit, this Cherry Orchard bracingly depicts the carnage of change, particularly in Yasha’s cruel treatment of doddery manservant Firs (Gawn Grainger), absurd personification of a dying way of life. Hilton (pictured below) demonstrates how belief in a revolutionary future can strip one of empathy for those in the present, while Rowan’s serf-turned-millionaire graduates from offering tone-deaf advice to enacting feudal vengeance. Nor are the sufferers of this reversal of fortune allowed to claim uncomplicated victim status; when backed into a corner, they use intimate knowledge to eviscerate.

Oft-cartoonish governess Charlotte (Sarah Malin) and mooching toff Simeonov-Pischik (Stephen Kennedy) benefit from this unsentimental, psychologically grounded approach, the former an androgynous, brusque cynic, the latter a candid study in dogged delusion. Most striking is Duchêne’s Ranevskaya, sometimes a grand dame indulgence, here sensual, erratic and rivetingly manipulative.

The murky naturalism is splintered with Mitchell’s striking stylistic elements, which variously underpin the achingly human tragedy and occasionally detract from it. Yet Chekhov's fatalistic desolation is conveyed with exceptional potency. “A whole new world will open up in front of us,” predicts Anya, and that reads not as rebirth, but descent into a terrifying chasm of the unknown.

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