The Cherry Orchard at Donmar Warehouse review – like hearing a Puccini aria played by Slipknot

Benedict Andrews is an Australian director with a reputation for iconoclasm. He’s full of bright, dazzling ideas to knock plays off the mantelpiece marked classic. Here he’s taken Chekhov’s elegiac comedy of 1903 and turned it into a loud, rowdy, expressionistic drama.

It’s like hearing a Puccini aria played by Slipknot. The melody survives but struggles to be heard. It’s invigorating and rather exciting, but not necessarily revelatory.

What makes the production shine, in fact, is the performances Andrews has elicited from his entire cast, most notably the German actress Nina Hoss as the spoilt and beautiful aristocrat Ranevskaya, whose refusal to face facts and be realistic about money leads to the destruction of her beloved cherry orchard, and Adeel Akhtar as Lopakhin, the man on the rise, who sees and brutally grasps the future. June Watson, as the aged servant Firs, stalking the action, mumbling profanities as she remembers the great days of serfdom, is also both truthful and very funny.

The tone is set from the outset when a cleaner vacuums around the prostrate form of Lopakhin, sleeping on the rich, red carpet with which designer Magda Willi has covered the floor and walls of the entire set. As the family gathers, stepping out of their seats in the surrounding audience to contemplate how to save their debt-laden ancestral home, they are dressed casually but in russet and pink colours that seem to blend in, as if they are woven into this place.

Andrews’ adaptation is raucous and sharp, peppered with profanity. Lopakhin, who has a habit of flashing his expensive gold watch, talks about putting “a smile on your dial” and getting “a rizzle on”. The cherry orchard is “heritage listed”. Odd lines are added about climate change and the state of the weather.

It also favours physical comedy. A member of the audience is pressed into service to represent Ranevskaya’s bookcase that her brother Gaev (given unusually vicious weight by Michael Gould’s superbly snarling performance) wants to eulogise. “The walking catastrophe” of the hapless bookkeeper Yepikhodov is turned into a cameo of heart-breakingly tender clowning by Éanna Hardwicke (making a terrific professional debut).

The wild, whirling quality of the change that is coming reaches its climax in the party in the second half where a discordant jazz band joins the company on stage, and Hoss reels round like a Seventies rock star, beautiful, uninhibited and completely lost. As an actress, she has an ability to register emotion in a fleeting moment; you can almost see her thinking about giving her purse to a homeless boy and know she will make the decision to overspend. She is totally distraught when she loses her home, yet still blinds herself with hopes of love.

Hoss reveals each thought and she’s matched by Akhtar whose sad eyes and gentle gestures suggest a different side to the “little peasant” whose ruthless business acumen has got him to the point where he can lord it over a family who still despises him. These are complex, complicated portrayals in the midst of a production that doesn’t go much for light and shade.

What’s missing in the approach is a sense of the subtleties of the shifting social setting in which the story unfolds. Daniel Monks’ perpetual student Trofimov ranting about the dream of a Bolshevik future at ever-increasing volume is amusing – and so is the way that Sadie Soverall’s wildchild Anya loves the words and thinks she loves the man – but the sense of his view rubbing up against Lopakhin’s pragmatism gets lost in all the shouting. So, until the very final scene when the stage is stripped bare, does the sadness of Marli Siu’s Varya, with her dashed hopes of love.

The sheer energy of Andrews’ approach carries it all along. It’s an enjoyable evening, but Chekhov is barely left standing at the close. It’s not just the trees that have been felled with a chainsaw.