Cate Blanchett’s Broadway debut has been hailed as ferocious, commanding and glorious.

The Australian actor plays Anna Petrovna in The Present, Andrew Upton’s reworking of the Chekhov’s Platonov.

Directed by John Crowley and also starring Richard Roxburgh, the the adaptation unfolds over the course of a birthday celebration in the post-Perestroika Russian countryside.

Blanchett missed Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony to appear on stage at the Ethel Barrymore theatre in New York. She has been a regular fixture of the pre-Oscar awards, having been nominated nine times and winning on three occasions.

Reviews for The Present have been largely positive, with many commenting on her role in carrying an otherwise overwrought story.

The Guardian gave the production four stars. Critic Alexis Soloski wrote: “Anna isn’t one to sit idly by and let hourglass sands bleed away. In Blanchett’s hands, she is sexy, antic, ferocious, imperious, mordant, and angry.”

She added: “When this production works best, as in a debauched dance sequence, a sudden shock of violence, and the flammable scenes between Roxburgh and Blanchett, it feels entirely of the moment and urgently, ripely alive.”

The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote: “Blanchett knows how to hold a stage and, if necessary, hijack it … Such commanding, try-anything charisma is useful if you’re attempting to hold together a badly assembled party or, for that matter, play.”

Variety said Blanchett was “a glorious example of profound Chekhovian ennui … Her throaty laugh suggests a cynical intellect and her long, loose limbs and bare feet convey a sense of wanton abandon that can drive men wild.”

The Telegraph also gave it four stars, with critic Diane Snyder saying the actor made juggling successful film and theatre careers “look astonishingly easy”.

Snyder continued: “As Anna Petrovna, a young widow celebrating her birthday with an assortment of old friends at her late husband’s estate, Blanchett is a bounty of restless energy, which Anna uses to mask her dissatisfaction with the past, her fear of the future and her yearning for Roxburgh’s Mikhail Platonov.”

While this was Blanchett’s Broadway debut, it was not her first venture on the New York stage. She has previously starred as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and as Yelena in Uncle Vanya at City Center. Both, like The Present, were Sydney Theater company productions.

On screen, Blanchett’s latest movie, Manifesto, receives its premier later this month at the Sundance film festival. The film, in which she plays multiple roles, is an enactment of artists’ statements from the German director Julian Rosefeldt.

The actor said in a recent interview that The Present brought to her mind political upheavals around the world in the past year, including Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the US. “You can’t present anything at the moment without thinking of the state the world is in,” she told Variety.

“We’re in a real state of – I was going to say ‘transition’, but I think it’s more of a realisation of what we’ve lost. We’ve lost the state of passivity, perhaps, that we’ve all been in, no matter what side of the political spectrum you are.”