Well, you couldn't call it a bland mediocrity. You could call it cut-and-paste Chekhov, you could call it ambient Chekhov, you could even call it Jive-Bunny-and-the-Mastermixers Chekhov. You could spit at its preciousness or swoon at its woozy atmospherics. But bland? Mediocre? No, the director Chris Goode's improvised spin on Three Sisters is too good and too bad to be either.

For the first 50 minutes of this 90-minute show, I confess I found it too bad. The cast - five women, one man - linger on a cramped country-house set crammed with furniture, hanging baskets, lamps, Post-it Notes and real rabbits. As they toy with this 1901 masterpiece about a trio of adult sisters yearning for Moscow but doomed not to leave their provincial estate, the players respond to ideas dropped from the ceiling for them in envelopes. As one of them tells us at the start: “We're looking for something we don't know how to describe.”

It comes on like a drama-school game with a budget. The cast swap parts, sometimes mid-speech, and treat the text like jazz players flicking through a symphony looking for hooks. They're having fun, but it's impressionistic verging on chaotic. When speeches do get through intact, though, Chekhov's genius cuts though the playful aesthetic that's hogging the stage.

But this only really takes off when the content gets blurred to the point of indistinction. As the pace quickens in Act III, ... Sisters - yeeurch! to the ellipsis, by the way - finds a poetry of its own. The less it plays as daffy deconstruction and the closer it gets to physical theatre - talking in unison, a ticking clock drowning out the words - the more alluring it becomes.

Not for the first time with one of Goode's good wheezes, what starts out as irksome pretension acquires a grace of its own by the end. Well, partly of its own - its plaintive mood is much in debt to its plaintive borrowed soundtrack. But the cast, never mind some precious and precarious moments, have a discipline about them that is neither po-faced nor glib.

Do they recontextualise the sisters' sense of stasis for a new century? Do they hell. If you want a sure bet, stay well away. But there's a spark of pure theatre in here that stays in the brain all the same.

Box office: 020-7229 0706, to July 5

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