The Cherry Orchard has been given an absurdist reboot – with blood transfusions, a beach party and a bed-hopping sex maniac. And thanks to Chelsea’s oligarch, it’s coming to Britain

Oh my goodness, what have they done to The Cherry Orchard? The grand ball has become a beach party. Madame Ranevskaya has a noose around her neck. The entire ensemble are receiving blood transfusions. And Lopakhin has become a sex maniac who begins the play in bed with the maid. There isn’t a samovar in sight – or even a cherry orchard, for that matter.

This is the Pushkin Drama Theatre’s production, which is on its way to Britain. I caught it in Moscow just before Christmas – and was somewhat taken aback. It is Chekhov as absurdist drama, played on a raked stage with minimal props. In this portrait of a dysfunctional family and a neurotic society, Lopakhin is a youthful oligarch in love with money – and with the glamorous Madame Ranevskaya. Both are much younger than we are used to seeing them in the UK, but the two leads – Viktoriya Isakova and Alexander Petrov – insist this is faithful to Chekhov.

I meet them just before curtain-up and ask if they are playing The Cherry Orchard as tragedy or comedy, such ambiguity being the defining characteristic of Chekhov. “Tragedy,” says Isakova emphatically. “Comedy,” says Petrov with a laugh. “The comedy and the tragedy are always there,” adds Isakova. “I see this in my own life. But Ranevskaya is a tragic figure.”

The director is Vladimir Mirzoev, a gnarled, bearded veteran who emigrated to Canada in 1989 but has continued to work extensively in Russia. He thinks the comedy v tragedy question is irrelevant. “You can’t pick one genre to define a whole life,” he says. “It contains elements of comedy, tragedy and farce.” He also rejects any suggestion that his take on Chekhov is radical. “For the more radically attuned part of the audience, this production may not be radical enough. But for the conservative part, it may be quite irritating. So we end up causing irritation to both sides.”

Mirzoev, who has never directed The Cherry Orchard before, wanted to make it relevant to the “problems, situations and fears” of people today. He says the “inevitable catastrophe” society faces, the “feeling that everyone is on the edge of a precipice”, will connect with the audience, even the well-heeled one in Moscow, where international sanctions are biting, inflation is rising and the nationalistic certainties of the Putin era are not as settled as they seem. So yes, it is a comedy, but one that Mirzoev calls a “comedy of catastrophes”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The comedy and tragedy are always there’ … Viktoriya Isakova in The Cherry Orchard. Photograph: Alex Yocu

The dilemma of how to play The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov’s final play, has been there from the beginning. Konstantin Stanislavski, the founder of modern Russian theatre, directed the premiere in 1904. He was firmly in the tragedy camp, whereas Chekhov insisted on calling it a comedy. They had had similar battles over Three Sisters in 1901, when Chekhov complained that Stanislavski’s “exuberance” was undermining his intentions.

Chekhov is the dramatist of the throwaway. He brings to mind John Lennon’s famous lyric: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Schemes are concocted only to collapse. In Uncle Vanya, the title character tries to shoot the parasitical Serebryakov, but inevitably misses – and life goes on. Stanislavski would have played up the drama of the attempt, while Chekhov would have enjoyed its futility.

In a sense, Chekhov is temperamentally more English than Russian – or at least more obviously suited to audiences in the UK where, with the possible exception of Brexit, muddling through is a way of life. “Despite all the interesting innovations and themes in Russian avant-garde theatre today, they are still stuck in social issues,” says the Russian-born Katya Rogatchevskaia, curator of east European collections at the British Library. “They are not dealing with existential questions in the way British theatre does.”

She recently saw a London production of Harold Pinter’s The Room and thinks a Russian company would struggle with it. “You cannot interpret it,” she says. “You have to understand that you don’t understand it.” But in Russia, she says, theatre and audience want resolution. Chekhov, because he is true to the messiness and self-deceptions of life, offers none.

Chekhov brings to mind John Lennon’s lyric, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’

Julie Curtis, professor of Russian literature at Oxford University, regards this as a simplification, but accepts that radicalism in the big Russian theatres is often directed at style rather than content. “In a way,” she says, “the easiest thing is to take a classic play – who can object to the content of The Cherry Orchard? – and then turn it into a directorial or design experiment.”

Mirzoev’s production may be an effort to rethink Chekhov, but where are the new plays that rethink the world? Concentrated in Moscow, St Petersburg and the Siberian cities, the principal theatres in Russia depend on state subsidy. The Russian Orthodox church and social conservatives are becoming ever-more censorious, while the trial of avant-garde director Kirill Serebrennikov for alleged fraud has suggested to some that artistic freedoms are increasingly under attack. Is it then so surprising that the main stages tend to concentrate on aesthetic challenges, leaving more highly charged new work to the burgeoning fringe?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A production of The Cherry Orchard by Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre. Photograph: Sputnik/Alamy

Theatrical innovation has a chequered history in Russia. The irony of the 1917 revolution, Professor Curtis points out, was that the leading revolutionaries were deeply conservative, at least artistically. Bizarrely, their models were the 19th-century tsars, who loathed innovative, free-thinking writers such as Mikhail Lermontov (Nicholas I called his A Hero of Our Time “odious and debauched”). In the 1920s, directors sought to introduce a radical new artistic dawn which they believed to be in keeping with the ideals of the revolution, only to be attacked in the following decade for “bourgeois formalism”. Several of the leading experimentalists, notably Vsevolod Meyerhold, met brutal ends in Stalin’s purges.

So, at the height of Stalinism, theatre settled into a socialist-realist rut. The Cherry Orchard was played – at a time when Chekhov’s other plays were largely neglected – as a political fable describing the downfall of an effete landed class. The nouveau riche Lopakhin (who wants to save Madame Ranevskaya from bankruptcy by turning her cherry orchard into holiday homes) and Trofimov (an unworldly, radical student) were seen as heralds of the new revolutionary age.

Then, in the 1960s, in the post-Stalin thaw, bourgeois formalism came back into vogue. Chekhov was revisited in a host of innovative new productions that mined the plays for metaphorical meaning. Suddenly Russian theatre was boundlessly exciting – and energised by friction with the authorities.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alexander Arsentiev and Anastasia Lebedeva in Pushkin Drama Theatre’s The Good Person of Szechwan, also at the Barbican. Photograph: Alex Yocu

Has that revisionism now run its course? Perhaps the socialist realists had a point: aesthetic experimentation on its own – noisy, exuberant art for art’s sake – is of limited value. The British approach to Chekhov can sometimes be unduly literal, genteel and cloying, but it is possible to err in the opposite direction: overinterpreting, striving for effect at the expense of the text, privileging metaphor over the notion that the author is portraying something approximating to real life.

“A lot of Russian directors of Chekhov seek to make a statement or present a view of the world,” says Sergei Ostrovsky, co-chair of the London-based Russian cultural centre Pushkin House and a one-time theatre critic turned corporate lawyer. “Very few productions actually want to read the play.” In part, he says, it is because the texts are so well known that directors feel obliged to turn them upside down, but he finds such self-consciousness off-putting. “It’s a very easy way out. You have a wonderful box of tricks and you just pull these things out.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chelsea owner turned theatre impresario Roman Abramovich. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Mainstream Russian theatre, with its emphasis on directorial ego and gorgeous picture-making on stage, strikes me as similar to regietheater (the German term for “director’s theatre”) in opera, where making a splash by rethinking, perhaps even subverting, the author’s intentions is central. It could be that Russian audiences know their Chekhov so well they have to be confronted with it in this way. But it may also be true that, faced with an endless diet of “radical” reinterpretation, true radicalism would consist in returning to the text and concentrating on the interplay of the characters.

The Pushkin troupe is bringing two other works to London’s Barbican: Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan; and a piece of physical theatre called Mother’s Field, adapted from a novella by Soviet-era Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov. Good Person has become the Pushkin’s signature show. The billionaire businessman Roman Abramovich watched a performance in Moscow, loved it, and has been instrumental in bringing it to London. His deep pockets are crucial – housing a 100-strong Russian company at the Barbican for a week does not come cheap.

Good Person, which I also saw in Moscow, is better suited to the Pushkin’s high-energy ensemble style. Brecht poses a social and moral problem – how to lead a good life in a corrupt society – with which the company can engage. Chekhov evades such didacticism: everything may be collapsing, but shouldn’t we just sit down and have a cup of tea? Provided someone has remembered the samovar, of course.

• The Pushkin Drama Theatre’s season at the Barbican, London, runs 5-9 February.