"The Seagull". Oxford Playhouse

Chekhov's genius, as well as his greatest challenge to an acting company, is that his plays seem to contain a lot of words and not much action. Doctors, actors, aristocrats and servants talk endlessly about their thwarted ambitions, unrequited loves and childhood memories, while the sun sets behind their fading Russian homesteads.

But there's actually a lot going on. These lives are submerged, concealed and betrayed by the very text that keeps them part of polite society. It's the job of the actors and the production to reveal that inner life in all its comic tragedy, without ever spilling the metaphorical samovar.

Lighthouse Productions have found an ingenious way to accomplish this in their passionate and intelligent interpretation of The Seagull at Oxford Playhouse. Specifically, director Alys Young has introduced not one but two boldly original concepts. 

First, the set. Rather than the usual, realistic country house with a lake, a temporary stage, and summer grasses wafting gently to the sound of drowsy insects, Young and set designer Max Antoniou have created a stark, bare stage on which the only construction is an enormous glass box at the back, divided into three equal sections by strips of mercilessly modern LEDs. In the box we glimpse characters who are not part of the current scene, living their lives beyond the play's printed page. Rowan Brown, as the gracefully ageing actress Irina, paces in there like a caged jaguar, planning her campaign to hold on to serial love-cheat Boris Trigorin. Self-styled revolutionary writer Konstantin shoots himself in the glass box. At its best, it's a visual stroke of inspiration that instantly casts an ironic, and truly Chekhovian, light on whatever is happening downstage. Sometimes however it just shows us characters walking across the stage, reminding us of who they are, but delivering less of a theatrical gut punch.

Young also used upstage illuminated panels in Lighthouse's last play, Things I Know To Be True, when they contained expressionistic silhouettes of family members. She's hit on a great technique that allows stage design to comment wordlessly but eloquently on stage action. 

And the second innovation: a troupe of eight ballet dancers who repeatedly invade the stage and perform brief, beautiful dance sequences. This might sound jarring, but it dovetails remarkably well with the play as a whole. Echoing Konstantin's own childhood memory of ballet dancers who lived next door, the dancers, in their white costumes, also evoke the seagull of the title, struggling for expression and flight, ultimately falling to the ground. They're like a mute, rhythmic Greek chorus, and their presence, surreal and symbolic, reminds us that Chekhov's work, while seeming to be realistic, is actually the herald of modernism in theatre.

Taken together, these two techniques embody Konstantin's own pivotal line, 'The point of theatre is to create a dreamspace.' The play is partly about the struggle to create new artistic forms, so Young's experimental staging becomes a response to Konstantin's own ambitions. And one of the highlights of the play is the scene in which these two new ideas come together. Konstantin (Ezana Betru, building on his last Chekhov outing in Uncle Vanya) sits downstage trying to explain his own failed efforts at writing, and the ballet dancers, now trapped in the glass box themselves, flutter briefly into movement to match his temporary flickers of inspiration. It's a beautiful marriage of spoken word and visual metaphor. 

This production of The Seagull has had an enviably long rehearsal period. The cast started work on it more than four months ago, and that time has not been wasted. There have been workshops with Jude Kelly, reappraisals of the whole play, but mostly time for these actors to get to know their characters like analysts know their patients.

As well as Betru and Brown, Sam Gosmore as Boris conveys both the self-deception of the middle-aged lecher who persuades himself that the desire he feels for the 18-year-old girl in front of him is true love, and also the two-faced regret he expresses to stay in Irina's good books. And Danya Griver as the ingenue Nina moves from youthful potential to hopeless failure in a dignified collapse that left me feeling somehow ashamed of witnessing her downfall. In some of the early scenes, that distinctive (but incredibly hard to capture) Chekhovian cocktail of tragedy delivered via a thousand tiny pinpricks of comedy does prove elusive, but by the end this feels like a genuine milestone of a show.

And it's worth staying after the curtain calls for Esme Somerside-Gregory (as Jacob the servant) delivering a bleak, harrowing, post-credits sequence that unites the task of tidying the stage with mopping up after a suicide: the perfect image for a production that brings together realism and artificiality to breathe life into an old Seagull.