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The idle rich haven't a clue: this is the standard line on Anton Chekhov's final play. The estate of Madame Ranyevskaya (Robyn Nevin) and her aristocratic family, with its famous cherry trees, is an island of denial in a fast-flowing stream of history, a tributary heading for the watershed of the Russian Revolution.
The blue bloods are either too lazy or too sneering of dirtying their hands with money - "Me? Get a job?" You can almost hear them squeak - to save their home and cushy existence.
But director Howard Davies, from London's National Theatre, has a variation: here the landed gentry - soon to be dispossessed of their land - aren't just apathetic procrastinators, they're potty to boot. Perhaps inbreeding has thinned the bloodline and along with it their wits.
Taking Chekhov at his word, Davies and the play's adaptor, Andrew Upton, go long on comedy. With its slapstick, magic tricks, a comic song and even a blink-and-you-missed-it appearance by a clown, the production is never less than entertaining - it's just not terribly poignant.
One of Chekhov's great achievements with this play is to make you care for a group so dissipated and dithering. But I was less moved by the Davies-Upton yuk-yuk interpretation - despite the penultimate scene showing Ranyevskaya and her middle-aged brother, Gaev (John Gaden), clinging to each other like frightened children - than I have been by other productions I've seen.
Often it seems like a competition to see who can be the most eccentric: is it the fumbling Yepihodov (Justin Smith), the mannish Charlotta (Pamela Rabe) or the ancient and deaf household servant, Firs (Peter Carroll)?
And isn't there something just a bit scary about the eccentricities of Nevin's Ranyevskaya, the way in which her mood changes so rapidly: giggly and girlish, imperious, sobbing, flirty? Is it Alzheimer's?
Counteracting the giddiness are Pip Miller's sponging and pathetic neighbour, Andy Rodoreda's caddish underling and Dan Spielman as a hanger-on, Trofimov, an intellectual who's so supercilious I kept hoping someone would punch him.
But the really weighty ballast in the helium balloon is Philip Quast, magnificent as the usurping entrepreneur, Lopakhin.
Lucy Bell, Gwyneth Price, Cameron Stewart and Anna Torv complete a top-drawer cast.
A bustling and cheerfully wayward Cherry Orchard, and Quast shows his grit, but not quite a revolution.
