Three years ago Katie Mitchell suggested that I write a version of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I told her I would never dare.

The Cherry Orchard is my favourite play. It is a complex exploration of a culture on the cusp of disappearance, the Russian aristocracy as it enters the final decade, before the revolution. Chekhov is my favourite writer. In his plays and short stories he excavated the human condition with more tenderness and honesty than anybody else I’ve read. Startling in his economy, he sees into his characters and their capacity for contradiction and silliness and despair with a clarity that staggers me.

I didn’t feel that I was good enough to write Chekhov into English. I didn’t feel as though I was grown-up enough.

Six months later, I changed my mind. I still didn’t feel grown-up or skilled enough to write a version of The Cherry Orchard properly but I hadn’t been able to shake the idea. Turning down such an opportunity troubled me more than my probable failure.

I have had three English-language versions of other plays produced. All three of them have been at the Young Vic. In 2011 my version of Jon Fosse’s I Am the Wind was staged there, and in 2012 my version of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

The process for working on The Cherry Orchard was similar to my processes in both those versions. I don’t speak Russian. The Oxford academic Helen Rappaport produced a thorough and invaluable literal translation of Cherry Orchard, complete with lengthy footnotes. My task was to make her translation actable. To turn it into a text that sits happily in actors’ mouths.

It is a process I find fascinating and rewarding. When making my own plays I rarely think consciously about language. Rather the bulk of my conscious work concerns narrative or structure or theme. The actual line writing is done best, I think, when it is entirely instinctive. Sometimes I can’t remember why I made particular word choices. This ignorance is often exposed by inquisitive actors in rehearsal rooms. This is how it should be.

My sole concern, in the case of these three versions of plays, has been linguistic. I have kept the characters the same and the structure the same and the story the same on all occasions. The judgment behind my word choices in The Cherry Orchard is entirely subjective and based on no linguistic consideration of original Russian syntax or grammar.

On the cusp of disappearance … The Cherry Orchard at the Young Vic. Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

The politics and ethics surrounding this process of producing new English versions of texts written in other language has sparked much debate.

In an introduction to his compelling versions of Strindberg plays, Gregory Motton savages the culture of writers writing versions from literal translations. The subjective decisions the writers make ease the jaggedness and vitality of the original plays, he argues. The act of writing a version becomes necessarily a dilution. The esteemed Chekhovian translator Michael Frayn agrees. His widely produced versions are written from the Russian. Frayn is a fluent Russian speaker.

I admire Motton and Frayn hugely. I also think they are wrong.

I think their ideas are based on the odd assumption that it is in some way possible to make a pure translation. It isn’t. Language shifts and mutates historically as well as geographically and to assume the possibility of a perfect translation is to ignore these shifts and changes.

It seems especially odd to suggest that a play text, out of any literary form, should be carved out of an attempt to accurately translate the original language of an author writing a century ago. Playwriting, for me, is not a literary or linguistic pursuit and plays are not literary artefacts. I think of them instead as being starting points for a night in the theatre.

It bewilders me that a translator of a Chekhov play should concern themselves with accurately replicating in English the Russian of the early last century even if this comes at the expense of the vitality, sensuality, pathos, rage and compassion of the spirit in which those plays were first made. When the concern with accuracy prevents interpretation or imagination on behalf of a director or an artistic team then it is not just wrong-headed but damaging.

To offer an example: Chekhov’s plays, like all plays, were written in the theatrical conventions of his time. He wrote four acts, which were performed with 45-minute intervals between each act. This leant itself to a literary style that became necessarily expositional. The audience needed reminding about what was going on. Our contemporary audience operates with different skills and needs and assumptions. To not address this and refine a text accordingly, purely because it would be an inaccurate representation of the original source artefact, seems bull-headed.

The Cherry Orchard has been translated into English on countless occasions. Since Stanislavski’s first production of the play at the Moscow Art theatre in January 1904, it has never been out of production and has been performed all over the world. It could be argued that the last thing the world needs is another version of the play.

I think the reason it continues to be reimagined and restaged is because nobody has ever got it right. Nobody has ever captured the depth and spirit of the play. Nobody has done this because nobody can, because language doesn’t work like that and language in theatre certainly doesn’t.

Gala Gordon (Irina), Mariah Gale (Olga) and Vanessa Kirby (Masha) in Three Sisters directed by Benedict Andrews at the Young Vic in 2012. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Freed from the pursuit of achieving the impossible, writers have instead been inspired to calibrate Chekhov’s work through their own standing ground. Anya Reiss in London and Annie Baker in New York have produced urgent contemporary versions of Uncle Vanya. John Donnelly’s recent The Seagull felt driven by a faith in Chekhov as a theatre worker with a vital relationship to his audience. Filter Theatre Company’s deconstruction of Christopher Hampton’s Three Sisters was as engaging as Benedict Andrews’ own version last year. I love Motton and Frayn’s writing but I think they are wrong to disparage the work of Reiss, Baker, Donnelly, Andrews and hundreds of others when the work these writers have made has felt so alive and alert.

I have worked closely with Katie Mitchell on my version of The Cherry Orchard. It is a thousand words shorter than Rappaport’s literal. Ours is not an accurate representation of what Chekhov intended, but it is an honest refraction of what his play means to us.

The Cherry Orchard is a play that resonates now with as much force as it ever did. It made sense to both myself and Katie that it should be produced in the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the first world war. The war was the first catastrophe that manifested the terror that Chekhov seemed to foretell for his characters. He dramatised a world shuddering with an uncertain sense that something awful was about to happen. The notion that England now is shuddering in the same sort of anticipation gripped both of our imaginations.

We were fascinated too by its consideration of grief. We have relocated the action of the play to more tightly excavate the grief caused by the death of a child. We have simplified the nomenclature of the play. We don’t use anachronistic words or references to our own contemporary culture in the way that Benedict Andrews did with such joy in Three Sisters, but we have tried to make a language that is simple and clear and economic.

We’ve done this not because we think it is a more accurate representation of the original Russian language, but because we are inspired by the play to make a night in the theatre that evokes the same sense of loss and tenderness and fear that reading Chekhov evokes in us.

I told the cast on the first day of rehearsals that I have probably failed in my version. I haven’t captured the breadth of the play or its truth or comedy or sexiness (and it is a very sexy and funny play). I never could have done. Nobody could have done. No matter how brilliant their Russian. No matter how masterful their stagecraft. The nature of translation means that to think otherwise is folly. The nature of theatre means that to aspire to do so is slightly perverse.

Instead we try to make versions of versions of versions. That is the essence of our work and it defines our art form.

In my failure though, I think we might come close to capturing something interesting. And I also think that we might continue the conversation so that in a very short space of time another writer will write another version of The Cherry Orchard. They will fail like I’ve failed. Their failure will inspire others. This is how it works and exactly how it should work. This is something to celebrate I think, not to chastise.

• Simon Stephens’ version of The Cherry Orchard runs at the Young Vic in London until 29 November 2014.

