Chekhov’s characters go endlessly round in circles at a snail’s pace: discuss. Well, it’s literally true in Robert Icke’s staging of Uncle Vanya: the raised box in which the (in)action takes place constantly rotates slowly, at one revolution per 35-to-50-minute act. Icke also deploys three intervals, leading to a near-three-and-a-half-hour total time: last year at this address he coped with the entirety of the Oresteia  trilogy plus scads of additional material in only a few minutes more.

His own adaptation thoroughly modernises and despecifies matters: names are Anglicised so that the title character becomes Uncle Johnny, another character reads a copy of what appears to be Le Monde, and the trio of drunks in Act Two bellow out Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life”. This sounds as if it allows the universality of the play full rein, but in fact it creates far more problems than it solves. It removes the underlying, supposedly characteristic Russian melancholy which Chekhov was so masterly at anatomising, and also the physical, geographical basis of the characters’ sense of isolation. The play is not just de-Russified but thoroughly deracinated. There seems, too, to be rather less compassion in the fabric, so that our laughter at the characters’ assorted delusions regarding their worth is more unambiguously that of derision without being shot through with rueful recognition.

And yet. And yet. And yet this hot young director’s Ivo van Hove-ish approach to the play, staging it with an almost unmodulated low-key ultra-naturalism, penetrates deeply. The updates most strikingly benefit Jessica Brown Findlay’s Sonya, dressed in grungey earth tones and painfully aware of her young-adult repressions and frustrations. Tobias Menzies as visiting doctor Michael (more usually known as Astrov) is also dexterous at portraying an ostensibly offhand cynicism whilst nursing a secret kernel of self-regard. As for Paul Rhys’s John, he seems constantly on the verge of breakdown into either tears or rage: his explosion in Act Three is both more plausible and more dangerous for the sense that he has been hanging on for so long by his fingernails. Icke’s production does not by any means have all the answers to staging Chekhov for a 21st-century British audience, but it does possess an infectious keenness in questing for them.

Written for the Financial Times.