In many productions of Chekhov's greatest play you glimpse the cherry orchard of the title blooming away far behind the stage. At Chichester, a flowery branch nearly makes it through a high window and on to Leslie Travers's big grey set. The gardener in me thought it should be pruned - and the critic in me that Philip Franks's production needed some creative horticulture too.

I yield to nobody in my love of Diana Rigg, and her Ranyevskaya is certainly the “magnificent looking creature” described by Lopakhin, the friend and former peasant who will eventually buy her over-mortgaged mansion and cherry orchard. Throughout the evening she's sweet, outgoing, generous, too generous. She spills out warm feelings as recklessly as she does roubles. But where's the dark that should come with the light? Her heart is being inexorably drawn back to Paris, where she has left the lover who exploited her, and she ends up returning there: which clearly bodes betrayal, pain, poverty, disaster.

Chekhov regarded The Cherry Orchard as a comedy, but there's offstage tragedy to come, and Rigg gives too little inkling either of that or of the profound anguish of losing her ancestral home. Likewise with her brother, William Gaunt's Gayev. He has a helpless, hapless, moment or two, babyishly blubbing when he stumbles in after a day in which he's seen the orchard sold, but still leaves emotionally too wispy an impression.

Yet this is a well-cast production - Maureen Lipman is there, exuding gawky neediness as the eccentric but lonely governess Charlotta, and Frank Finlay trudges and mumbles through the role of the antique butler Firs - and there are undeniably interesting performances on show.

I've never seen Varya, Ranyevskaya's adopted daughter, played with such severity as she is by Jemma Redgrave. She picks up on the character's religious beliefs, invoking God with passion and longing, crossing herself when so much as a saucer is broken, and finding it anguish to do something as secular as dance. She is, as she herself suggests, a natural nun and that's why Lopakhin resists the idea of marrying her.

Especially the rough, tough Lopakhin we get from Michael Siberry. More than any I've seen, he makes clear the ferocity of spirit it must have taken to rise from rags to riches. He's not just irked by the refusal of the orchard's owners to accept his well-meant advice: he's maddened, infuriated, bawling “you're a stupid old woman” at Gaunt's Gayev. Does he bring too much snarling triumphalism to the famous scene in which he announces he's bought the orchard? Well, he misses the sensitivity that lurks behind the insensitivity, But, yes, he adds a visceral punch to a production that sometimes lacks it.

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