The hook for the public here is the bumper crop of big -name “scalps” both onstage and off. It’s a season composed of productions of Chekhov’s first three full-length plays (not counting The Wood Demon, which he later reworked as Uncle Vanya) in versions by David Hare: revivals of Hare’s renditions of Platonov (c.1881/2001) and Ivanov (1887/1997) and a new adaptation of the first of Chekhov’s four mature masterpieces The Seagull (1896). Jonathan Kent, who directed the “Hare premières” of the two earlier plays when he was joint artistic director of the Almeida, returns to them now with an ensemble cast including Anna Chancellor, Samuel West, Nina Sosanya and a host of other highly recognisable names and faces. The schedule presents opportunities until mid-November to see one, two or all three plays on the same day.

I was surprised by the consistency of the Chekhovian voice across the three works; like many others, I had considered the earlier pieces to be of secondary interest only. But they show a unifying vision of a world of circumscription and futility and of our selfish, petty preoccupations in it. The principal beneficiary here is Platonov. Chekhov abandoned his first play unstaged; the surviving manuscript does not even include his own title for it. Here, though, James McArdle’s Lothario of a small-town schoolmaster rollicks in a disarmingly self-conscious, vodka-steeped manner. He also works as a gadfly to a ruling class much more ostentatiously redundant than they are in earlier plays, exemplified in David Verrey’s spluttering loan shark.

The protagonist of Ivanov can easily seem a moral prig. It is a canny move, then, to cast in the role Samuel West, who is possessed of an innate likeability. His portrayal of what we now recognise as clinical depression is not psychologically accurate, but it is dramatically sympathetic, which is what is required here. We remain engaged with him through his agonised struggles with a love affair even as his wife is dying, and his conflict with the honesty-at-all-costs policy of Doctor Lvov is evenly balanced, thanks also to McArdle investing Lvov with a fatal self-congratulation.

West shows how hollow that affability of his can be as Trigorin in The Seagull: he seems open and unforced, but all that matters is his work as a writer. Likewise with Anna Chancellor as the laughing flibbertigibbet but personally and professionally insecure actress Arkadina. Olivia Vinall reaches the culmination of her trio of romantically abused young women, after Sofya in Platonov and Sasha in Ivanov, as the casually abandoned Nina. In her final scene of wild distraction, Vinall finds what I think is a fortuitous effect: she slaps her forehead, but hits the contact microphone she is wearing so that it sounds as if she is slamming an empty cupboard.

Other plaudits are due to Des McAleer, who over the day plays two vexed estate managers and a growling brigand, and Lucy Briers as an unrelenting creditor in Ivanov and the manager’s wife in The Seagull. Some such collective presentations (such as Trevor Nunn’s staging of Shakespeare’s Wars Of The Roses, reviewed a couple of weeks ago) fall prey to diminishing returns as the day progresses. I expected this to be such an affair, but on the contrary it is one of those instances where the whole genuinely proves more than the sum of its parts.

Written for the Financial Times.