Roger Allam, cast against type, plays Lopakhin, making him sound better educated than he professes to be. But Allam's posture when he listens shows that he is a man unique in the play, who looks at the world around him. The play is finely cast right down the list, with Corin Redgrave presenting a whimsical academic Gaev, and Michael Bryant a crumbling Firs who finally lies down on the empty floor, where a slowing musical box has already expired. He, the toys, a way of life, have all gone into the past.
 

...by and large I think Nunn is serving the National well. The autumn season looks both tempting and intelligent, and Nunn's determination to make the National a place for people of all theatrical tastes strikes me as admirable. With his pioneering ensemble company last year, Nunn acheieved the most distinguished, and brilliantly acted, body of work I've seen in more than 20 years of attending the NT. Hopes were therefrore exceptionally high for his new staging of The Cherry Orchard, starring some of the National's finest players as well as Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, as Ranyevskaya and her ineffectual brother Leonid. Almost all expectations are triumphantly fulfilled. During first rate productions like this you almost forget you are watching acting at all. We seem instead to be witnessing the restless, constantly changing flow of life itself, with its eddies of excitement casual cruelties yawning tedium and sudden moments of extreme pain and happiness.

In this beautifully acted production, Nunn again proves that when it comes to the classics he is a master of both mood and detail. Each of the four acts has its own atmosphere and rhythm, from the bustle of dawn arrivals of the first to the outdoor afternoon languor of the second, the wild boozy partying for the third and the throat-catching final departures of the last scene, with that desolate coda involving the faithful servant Firs and that eerie sound of a snapping cable. Maria Bjornson has created a marvellously evocative design with the audience sitting on three sides of the actors. The lovingly detailed nursery reminds us that the main characters have never grown up, and there is a beautiful panoramic view of the doomed orchard, the light subtly changing depending on the time of day and the season.

Corin Redgrave suggests a nasty vein of snobbery as well as the abstacted, sentimental charm of her brother, and the great Roger Allam is in superb form as that upstart peasant Lopakhin. He beautifully signals just how besotted he is with Ranevskaya, and the scene when he tries and fails to propose to her plain adopted daughter, Varya, heartwrenchingly played by Eve Best, is both the funniest and the most touching of the evening. But you want to mention the entire cast. It is hard to imagine a more lovable or more poignant Firs than Michael Bryant's and William Gaunt and Richard Henders both offer wonderful comic value.
 

Trevor Nunn's compelling production has fine performances all round, including that of Charlotte Emmerson as Anya. It seems almost unfair to single out William Gaunt as the fungus-faced neighbour and Michael Bryant's gnome like butler. But the evening belongs to Roger Allam as the rich upstart Lopakhin...I've seen no finer acting this year than when he cannot quite bring himself to propose to Eve Best's agonised Varya. A moment full of hilarity and heartbreak, it sums up this delicious play perfectly.
 

Nunn [still] manages to capture the comic absurdities, escapist follies and illusions of Chekhov's feckless gentry, and the servants are beautifully observed. Michael Bryant's Firs totters around in an old world of his own, murmuring sweet nothings to himself and anyone who will listen to him. Suzanne Bertish's exquisitely poignant governess injects a Slavic note of melancholia and Maxine Peake's housemaid, Dunyasha, basks in borrowed gentility.

The production seethes with bustle, energy and action from the moment Vanessa Redgrave's Madame Ranevskaya, the estate owner, sweeps home from Paris with her daughter, Anya (baby-voiced Charlotte Emmerson) powered by waves of nostalgia. In the role of a woman who has been destructively generous with both her body and her money, Miss Redgrave flirts on all fronts, even kissing the furniture. She dresses to seduce in sumptuous long dresses and a picture-hat. Her performance lays too great a stress on winsomeness, except when she raises a chilling howl of grief for her dead son, thereby revealing herself apt for Greek tragedy. But by playing Ranevskaya as both scatter-brained mother and pleasure prone teenager who has never quite grown up, Miss Redgrave lets you see with piercing clarity how the character has contributed to the family's decline and fall.

Corin Redgrave as her brother Gaev, with the airs of a prim pedantic schoolmaster, is a matching study of windy vacuousness. Eve Best, dressed in funereal black, as Ranevskaya's adopted daughter, grimly observes the family rent asunder.
 

Nunn won every award in sight last year with a staging of Gorky's Summerfolk, a play premiered the same year as The Cherry Orchard, which shows that what Ranyevskaya thought preposterous was already happening in pre-revolutionary Russia. Nunn's shift to Chekhov's drama is like the addition of the left-hand panel to a glorious diptych. In the intimacy of the Cottesloe, the audience sits around a set surmounted at one end by the eponymous trees in a framed tank. Polls for the greatest play of the 20th century regularly placed The Cherry Orchard at the top. Watching Nunn's production you feel inclined to agree.

The generosity of Chekhov's vision is everywhere apparent. Never has it been more clear that Lopakhin is in love with Ranyevskaya because she was kind to him as a child and that this could be everyone's temporary salvation. Like some great exotic bird at the mercy of every gust of emotion, Vanessa Redgrave's heroine ruffles his hair and plays tunes on the old musical box, oblivious to his nostalgic passion for her.

The actress's brother, Corin, plays her character's sibling Gaev, turning in brilliant portraits of a pampered old maid and inveterate snob. Even in the midst of some outburst of grief, he is the kind of man whose attention can be side-tracked by annoyance at some vulgar smell or by the ritzy label on some pricey comestible. And yet, the performances ensure that you cannot write off these characters, as history is about to do. When Redgrave shudders at the thought that she has to leave the house where her son was drowned, it cuts, for a moment, right through questions of class.

Full of brilliantly controlled changes of mood, the production is as rich in deeply felt and considered performances. Trevor Nunn's enemies, who want to see him out of the National, will find this production a tremendous inconvenience.
 

It is tempting to dwell on individual moments...But such incidents, memorable, though they are, derive half their power from context, or from cumulative effect. The underlying structure of this superficially loose-knit play is superb - except that one hesitates to use the word 'structure' about something that seems so natural and organic.

The production itself is an intimate one, with the audience sitting round three sides of a square. We follow the action in unsparing close-up - which would be a risky procedure if we didn't feel close to the characters in a double sense, if we weren't drawn into the smallest details of their lives. And Maria Bjornson's excellent set cleverly avoids any suggestion of things being squashed together (except in the nursery scene, where a certain amount of clutter is anyway called for).

But there can be no doubting Redgrave's power where it matters most - in the fierceness with which she recoils from the memory of the river where her little boy was drowned, or in the scorn with which she treats Trofimov's claim that he is above a mere love affair.

But Allam's performance is so brilliant that reservations get swept to one side. He shines throughout, but he is particularly good going through agonies in the great non-proposal scene with Varya just before the end.

As for Corin Redgrave, he gets better and better. As Gaev, Ranevskaya's garrulous brother, he is faultless: his performance is a perfect study of weakness poised on a fine edge between the amiable and the contemptible. There is a string of fine performances elsewhere --among others, Suzanne Bertish as the German governess and William Gaunt as Simeonov-Pischik. And how can you go wrong with Michael Bryant as the decrepit old servant Firs? The National has many different tasks to perform. But its most important one, in my view, is to do justice to the classics, and on this occasion it has discharged its duty to the full.
 

The audience [is] up close and almost sharing the cluttered Russian country house whose occupants are so real, so natural, so transparently absurd, it is as if we are eavesdropping unobserved.

Corin Redgrave is also superb, an emotionally moth-balled, upper-class twit, ludicrous and lost in a bygone world.
 

There are many wonderful moments. As the rising businessman Lopakhin, Roger Allam's whole manner to the housemaid Dunyasha changes when they are no longer alone. When Vanessa Redgrave realises that this Trofimov was her dead son's tutor, her face falls and ages 20 years in three seconds. Michael Bryant, as the old retainer Firs, chuckles enchantingly as he first crosses the stage delighted to be back in the old home.
 

Nevertheless, the multi-talented David Lan's latest adaptation has the virtue of being winningly plain spoken. Michael Bryant's cackling Firs is a surprisingly sharp old codger, while Roger Allam's Lopakhin manages to be both insensitive, yet touchingly smitten by Ranevskaya. And last but not least, Eve Best is extraordinarily tender as the adopted daughter Varya, relegated to a housekeeping spinster but still pining for love.
 

Here's an event to make you rejoice that Trevor Nunn is directing at the National. From the opening moments in which the cast bursts from the back of the stage and sweeps through the audience, The Cherry Orchard is an engrossing experience. This production is already famous for casting Corin and Vanessa Redgrave as brother and sister landowners, but it should also be celebrated as an inspiriting piece of ensemble work.

Meticulous detail and a grand sweep are combined as Nunn combined them in his production of Gorky's closely related play, Summerfolk. The most gorgeous touch in Maria Bjornson's design is the creation of the orchard, projected above the action, its boughs outlined against a changing sky.

The most revealing stroke is to scatter the stage with nursery furniture - a child-sized chair, a doll's pram. This play, Nunn's production makes clear, is about growing up - and failing to do so. Which is why casting the Redgraves is a triumph. Watching them, frolicking in middle age, clinging to each other in their family home, you see a couple whose past locks them together - and stops them from moving on. Corin Redgrave catches this creaky infantilism superbly.

His sister is - sometimes within one speech - unnerving, unconvincing and dazzling. She mutters some lines with a voice so flat and faltering it's as if she can scarcely be bothered to speak. You realise only afterwards that you've been tricked into hearing them afresh. She semaphores distress hammily. And then she flashes illumination. Urging an up-and-coming entrepreneur to marry her adopted daughter, she all the while seduces him herself, as she slowly caresses his head.

But the success of the evening is not a sibling matter. David Lan's new translation is lively. The infinitely subtle Roger Allam makes the caressed entrepreneur into a newly sympathetic figure. Eve Best plays his would-be lover with a precisely-judged mixture of pain, crossness and bossiness. As the old retainer, Michael Bryant, apparently selfless but also self-absorbed, serves as the heart of the play.
 

Intimations of upheaval

This, by my reckoning, is the fourth Cherry Orchard that the National has given us in 27 years. But, even if Trevor Nunn's new production does not efface memories of its predecessors, it is a good, well-cast version that gives us Chekhov's concrete particularity. Played on a sparse rectangle with the audience on three sides, it also gains from the Cottesloe Theatre's revealing intimacy.

The most intriguing performance predictably comes from Vanessa Redgrave as Ranevskaya. Conventionally the character is played as a heedless romantic. Redgrave instead offers us a restless, tactile, highly sexed and deeply maternal woman forever guided by her instincts. She genuinely loves her old house, as you can see by the way she swoops on the nursery sofa to shower it with kisses.

But she is also the victim of her uncensored passion. Her dream of saving the family estate by marrying the buyer, Lopakhin, off to her adopted daughter, Varya, comically backfires precisely because it is she herself who enchants the upwardly mobile businessman.

Redgrave's highly intelligent performance - and Nunn's production - reminds us that Chekhov's play is about class as well as money, property and misdirected passion. This Ranevskaya's privileged upbringing leads her to remember the nursery furniture but not the housemaid's name. Corin Redgrave's fine Gaev is not just an arrested adolescent but a rank snob. Class is also the key to Roger Allam's excellent Lopakhin: it accounts for his lifelong fascination with Ranevskaya, his incredulous delight at buying the estate and his paralysing inhibition. There is a truly Chekhovian piece of comedy when, in the abortive proposal to Varya, Allam prepares to go down on bended knee and scoops up a bottle of champagne instead.

At times the production succumbs to old-fashioned atmospherics: when the departing Ranevskaya lays a floral tribute on a music-box, Nunn treads a delicate line between irony and sentimentality. And although David Lan's new version is very direct, I can't help wondering what's wrong with the dozen other existing translations. But it is a clear, soundly conceived production that reminds you that, beneath the imperishable beauty of Chekhov's play, lay intimations of revolutionary upheaval.