LONDON — Just when you think you’ve got Chekhov pegged as elegiac or poignant or even weepy, along comes the director Katie Mitchell to remind us that his four greatest plays can be quite ruthless, too.
Ms. Mitchell has been dipping in and out of that canonical quartet for the past two decades or so, saving his final play, “The Cherry Orchard” (at the Young Vic Theater through Nov. 29) for last. And she reminds us that when it comes to the Russian master, a take-no-prisoners approach can deliver a fresh take on these time-honored texts.
Gone are any grandiose theatrics. Those used to the self-dramatizing arias that often accompany Chekhov will note at once the flinty, clear-eyed appraisal of the play’s aristocratic heroine, Mme. Ranevskaya (Kate Duchêne), who returns from Paris to her beloved family estate — which contains the vaunted orchard of the title — in provincial, pre-revolutionary Russia only to end up bidding farewell to both her home and her homeland.
The poster art for the production shows a young man submerged in water, and onstage Ms. Duchêne, often barefoot, makes palpable the sorrow and self-reproach of a woman whose only son drowned some years before, with Ranevskaya quick to blame herself for life’s cruel blows. Hyper-aware but also so self-absorbed that she can’t heed the changing social order taking shape around her, she is here less the grande dame of Chekhovian lore and more a borderline hysteric, pills at the ready.
And so it goes across a refreshingly unsentimental production that seems to re-examine each beat of the play. Aided by a new English-language version from the playwright Simon Stephens, whose “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” has just opened on Broadway, this “Cherry Orchard” contains moments of revelation, large and small. For example, I didn’t expect Ranevskaya to come on so suggestively to Trofimov (a piano-playing Paul Hilton), her son’s tutor — as if such advances might somehow help her reclaim the lost boy. And it seems a quiet masterstroke to turn the young manservant Yasha (Tom Mothersdale) into an opportunistic thug who kowtows to his superiors not long before he is seen giving his aging colleague, Firs (Gawn Grainger), a brutal kick.
Ms. Mitchell gives her familiar aesthetic full rein. Each of the play’s four acts is marked by a swift lowering of the curtain that seems to anticipate the merciless razing of the orchard, and James Farncombe’s shadowy lighting allows no more illumination than would be appropriate to this bygone time and place. And if Dominic Rowan’s expert Lopakhin — the self-made entrepreneur who buys the estate after the family ignores his appeals to take financial responsibility for it — looks more contemporary than the others, that feels right, too. As Ms. Mitchell knows, the moneyed London of today is rife with Lopakhins: Chekhov’s vanished world in its way is ours, as well.
Two other recent openings set their sights far lower than Ms. Mitchell’s and don’t always succeed even there. Tim Firth’s play “Neville’s Island” garnered support (and a nomination for an Olivier Award for best comedy) during its first West End run 20 years ago, but time hasn’t been kind to what is most charitably viewed as a breezier English variant on “Deliverance,” the 1970 James Dickey novel that spawned the 1972 film. The director Angus Jackson’s revival, first seen last fall at the Chichester Festival Theater, is at the Duke of York’s Theater through Jan. 3.
In Mr. Firth’s scenario, four men are cast adrift in the wilds not of the southern United States but of northwest England’s Lake District when their boat capsizes and cellphone contact goes dead (an explanatory bit of narrative not needed, clearly, when the play was first produced). Business colleagues whose job titles are rattled off and then scarcely referenced again, the quartet face their predicament by cracking jokes, only to come close over time to cracking up.
The motley crew is dominated by Gordon (an aptly sour Adrian Edmondson, the noted English comedian), a waspish malcontent who finds himself yearning for a McDonald’s; and by the emotionally fragile Roy (the television actor Robert Webb), whose embrace of Christianity allows for way too many jokes on a single subject. (When a lone sausage is discovered, Rob insists the men say grace before digging in.)
Mr. Firth has to work double-time to keep the scenario afloat, and the ending seems dictated by a simple need to wrap things up. None of the four — Miles Jupp and Neil Morrissey complete the cast — make for especially engaging company. Gordon in particular suggests the sort of withering smarty-pants whom one would be perfectly happy to send down river and never see again.
The designer Robert Innes Hopkins has come up with a botanically impressive jungle of a set (you can practically smell the gathering damp), and patrons seated near the front are given protective raingear, which can’t defend against a play that is itself awfully soggy.
“Memphis,” in turn, seems to have sprung from the mind of a fantasist and a derivative one at that, notwithstanding the fact that this latest West End import from Broadway won four 2010 Tony awards, including best musical. To be fair, it’s hardly the show’s fault that its depiction of race relations in the 1950s music industry had the bad luck to open here within days of a second New York title, “The Scottsboro Boys,” that has considerably more to say — and says it better — on the abiding issue of race.
What can be laid at the feet of “Memphis” is the way Joe DiPietro’s book glosses over weighty, sometimes grievous goings-on. Barely, for instance, has Felicia (Beverley Knight), a black singer who crosses the racial divide to hit the big-time, suffered a racial attack before her scars, both physical and emtional, seem to disappear.
In much the same way, the pioneering if illiterate white D.J. Huey (Killian Donnelly), with whom Felicia falls in love, arrives at celebrity status via improbable authorial fiat. Oh, and Huey has a bigoted mother (Claire Machin) who — wouldn’t you know — turns into an enlightened soul sister complete with an ersatz roof-raiser of a number in the second act.
Luckily, Christopher Ashley’s production has a pair of galvanic stars in Ms. Knight and Mr. Donnelly — English and Irish, respectively — who tear into the distinctly American material as if it were meatier than it actually is. And the choreographer Sergio Trujillo keeps the ensemble around them so tightly drilled that you may not notice to what extent a previous occupant of the same theater, “Hairspray,” addressed the topic of integration in 1960s Baltimore with far greater ease. Mr. DiPietro and David Bryan’s score even comes with its own second-act injunction to the audience “to stand up.” Ever-obedient, by the end they do.
The Cherry Orchard. Directed by Katie Mitchell. Young Vic Theater. Through
Nov. 29.
Neville’s Island. Directed by Angus Jackson. Duke of York’s Theater. Through Jan. 3.
Memphis. Directed by Christopher Ashley. An open-ended run at the Shaftesbury Theater.