When summer turns sour

Uncle Vanya, Donmar Warehouse, London; Afterplay, Gielgud, London; Ivanov, NT Cottesloe, London; Othello, Royal Exchange, Manchester

Our summer is over, or very nearly so. That always seems to be how things stand – not just literally but also spiritually – in the great, delicate tragicomedies of Anton Chekhov. In Uncle Vanya, staged by Sam Mendes for his farewell season at the Donmar, a meadow of tall drying grass surrounds the Serebraykovs' provincial villa. And correspondingly, David Bradley's gaunt Alexander is a desiccated husk of a man with a few flecks of tenderness left.

A retired professor, he has suddenly descended on the estate that he's lived off, long-distance, for years – with the hint of a giant locust about him. His formerly admiring brother-in-law, Simon Russell Beale's Vanya, is now bitter and letting everything go to seed – being hopelessly smitten with Alexander's young second wife, Yelena (Helen McCrory). She is, in turn, an unhappy, languorous beauty who – unless she has an affair – will end up emotionally buried alive. Indeed, everybody sits round a long wooden table here, sipping unwanted tea or knocking back vodkas in a symbolically sunken house. The grass grows above their heads, at balcony level on Anthony Ward's set.

Mendes's talents as a stage director certainly haven't atrophied, his departure to make movies being a loss to British theatre. Uncle Vanya is characteristically uncluttered, a quietly assured production where top-rank players offer unshowy naturalistic acting. Indeed, at its best, this is an exceptionally subtle domestic tragedy where frustrated people fall apart almost imperceptibly – like unwatered flowers wilting, hour by hour. You strongly feel the wasted potential – in Russell Beale's delightfully witty and acerbic Vanya, and in McCrory's glazed eyes which, when they don't look frosty, seem on the brink of tears. Playing Sonya – Yelena's romantically overlooked stepdaughter – Emily Watson is notably ardent beneath her dowdy, head-girlish exterior.

That said, almost everyone's suppressed desires could be sweated out a bit more. There's a storm brewing after all. Mark Strong as the supposedly magnetic doctor, Astrov, is so suave his character's speeches about saving forests just sound like tepid lectures. Thus you miss the dramatically ingenious blurring of his twin passions for flora and fauna and for Yelena, his sultry pupil. Still, at the risk of sounding merely academic myself, one may enjoy anticipating the parallels between scenes of wooing and carousing in this play and the next – Twelfth Night, which Mendes's cast will perform in rep with Vanya from next month.

Incidentally, it's perverse to call the eloquent, mildly edited English language version of Chekhov's script used here "Uncle Vanya by Brian Friel". However, a sequel, dreamed up by this Irish veteran and entitled Afterplay, has coincidentally transferred to the West End this week from Dublin's Gate Theatre. Friel's postscript is intriguing, taking the aforementioned Sonya two decades onwards, to the 1920s, where he has her meet Andrey, the brother from Three Sisters, in a rundown Moscow cafe. The result is something like Chekhov crossed with Close Encounters... and Waiting For Godot.

Robin Lefèvre's production is classy, starring John Hurt and Penelope Wilton. Her Sonya, now struggling to manage the estate alone, is a stoical, sometimes abrupt but endearingly cranky spinster. Hurt's Andrey seems warm and relaxed away from his siblings, explains he's earning a bit as a violinist, and is clearly taken with Sonya. He confesses he was a reckless drunk for years after his wife Natasha left him. However, he's also a compulsive fibber.

Friel's dialogue is humorous, humane and wise about the need for fortitude. Yet this short show is inconsequential, really. Though I loved one or two surprise twists (particularly Natasha's cosseted baby, Bobik, becoming a jailbird), our protagonists fill in and analyse their backstories too obviously. Nobody talks about politics, either, even though the Bolshevik Revolution has clearly occurred in the intervening years. Fundamentally, Afterplay is a gentle theatrical exercise, full of fondness for Chekhov's characters but almost sentimental and thin on new ideas.

Theatreland's current craze for Chekhov takes us next (in reverse gear) to Ivanov, the playwright's early play (produced in 1887, though re-drafted thereafter). This backwater drama is not only a strikingly seminal work, centring around a depressed landowner who no longer loves his ailing wife, dismisses the moneymaking schemes of his steward, and only briefly believes he might start afresh with the adoring daughter of his neighbour, Lebedev.

Katie Mitchell's chamber production also makes one see this as a particularly bleak, socially damning piece. Though there are flashes of honour and generosity – notably from Peter Wight's shambling, loveable Lebedev – most of the locals are avaricious and spiteful, almost Dickensian and anti-Semitic to boot. Sometimes this generates an intensely corrosive, claustrophobic atmosphere, especially with a traverse audience banked on either side of one narrow room. Yet Mitchell's ensemble, in spite of fine individual performances and beautiful period costumes, hasn't quite gelled. Some comical moments are missed, perhaps because Owen Teale was rushed in to fill the title role at short notice (Paul Rhys withdrawing due to family illness). It would be unfair, in the circumstances, to expect the celebrated intensity Ralph Fiennes brought to Ivanov some years back. But with Teale looking more awkwardly stolid than internally harrowed, his misery becomes a bore.

Shakespeare's Cyprus is far more frighteningly hellish in the Royal Exchange's tense, in-the-round production of Othello where Paterson Joseph plays the jealousy-plagued general and Andy Serkis' Iago torments him like a vicious matador bringing a magnificent bull to its knees. Serkis is particularly chilling because he appears to be an impeccably dutiful sergeant on parade – snapping to attention with a switch under his arm. In his soliloquies, he insinuatingly plays the chummy cockney entertainer with us before cursing the Moor with a hideous scorching energy – ranting like Adolf Hitler with a voice like spewing tar.

Director Braham Murray's supporting cast are uneven. Emma Darwall-Smith's Desdemona falls just short of tragic poignancy, and the vaguely modern costumes are a mishmash. No matter though when Serkis and Joseph are so riveting a duo. The latter starts off an innately dignified, warmly confident soldier. But clearly needled deep down by his father-in-law's racist slurs, his later explosion of marital insecurity and violent insanity is devastatingly convincing. Potent stuff.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Uncle Vanya': Donmar, London WC2 (020 7369 1732), to 20 Nov; 'Afterplay': Gielgud, London W1 (0870 890 1105), to 1 Dec; 'Ivanov': NT Cottesloe, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 12 Oct; 'Othello': Royal Exchange, Manchester (0161 833 9833), to 2 Nov