First of all, you may wonder: why Ivanov? Why not one of the Chekhovs we all know well? Ivanov was performed by the Anthill company, South Melbourne, in the mid-1980s, but probably not since, in Melbourne anyway. Be that as it may, the play was not a success for its author when it first appeared in Moscow in November 1887, partly perhaps because of the difficulty the audiences found in deciding where their sympathies were meant to go, and in January 1889 a revised version appeared to acclaim. More than a century later, having come to accept the subtle complexities of Chekhov’s moral universe, we have been moved to veneration for various productions. The plays have always attracted distinguished casts, ensembles in which star performers necessarily sink their particularity in the common cause of breathing life into these often weary, often over-cerebral characters locked into various kinds of impasse. But one doesn’t hear of many famous Ivanovs, though Gielgud, as director and eponym, found it rewarding in 1965, both in London and New York.

These are plays in which old ways, especially aristocratic old ways, are seen to be dying, and with them the decorums, as well as the oppressions, they brought with them, but the new order seems almost ‘powerless to be born’ in the words of Matthew Arnold (who died just as Ivanov was undergoing revision). It’s a strange world in which lassitude often seems more acceptable than industry. There is sometimes the sense of an austere nostalgia for what has been lost in the face of the ruthlessness that may be necessary to supplant it. And yet honest work is at least part-panacea for draining ennui.

Though Ivanov anticipates some of the thematic concerns to which Chekhov will return in the later plays, it has never attracted anything like the same interest. Why not? I am not a Chekhov scholar, merely an idolater, but it seems likely that a play whose landowner protagonist is a depressive and an often angry melancholic, who neglects his terminally ill wife and is willing to talk of love to his neighbour’s young daughter, may be starting behind scratch in terms of public appeal. The forces of life are impotent against this overwhelming and incoherent anomie. He is kept company by a foolish extrovert cousin and an impoverished uncle out to make a lucrative marriage, and feels himself as much at odds with these as with the wife he can no longer love and with her priggish doctor. The latter sees himself as a moral spokesman but is really no more than a ramrod of ideology and judgment. What Ivanov has going for him is that he is aware of complexity, of the fact that there are no easy answers, and that he does not lie.

The play ends not even on the guarded, blinkered, poignant stoicism of Vanya but on a shocking note of – what? When Ivanov blows his brains out off-stage, there is not the grandeur of tragedy. In the last scene, as his wedding party gathers, it’s just possible that he won’t succumb to the debilitating depression but that the exquisite Sasha may reclaim him for life. But no.

Not in any way an easy play then, but Ariette Taylor’s glorious production grapples with all its intricacies and problems with fierce honesty, intelligence and clarity. There is no sense of simplifying what Chekhov has chosen to represent as complicated. There is plenty of comedy, but our laughter has a way of freezing on the lips, and Taylor never allows this to be a sop to the audience as it was in the Bell Company’s recent Twelfth Night or, to a lesser extent, Measure for Measure. Even the more broadly comic characters – the excise officer played by Bob Hornery, the ‘old woman of unknown profession’ played by Monica Maughan, and the dashing widow, played by Jane Nolan, who wears her black weeds as if she were about to dance the tarantella – are so wholly inside their peripheral characters that there is no suggestion of mere ‘comic relief’ about them. Nor is there any playing for easy sympathy. One is left wondering if Ivanov has been defeated, or whether the wedding party has failed to have its way in getting him to deny his bleak view of the world.

A couple of points about the production context for this all-but-unique performance. First, experienced as Taylor is – she had a long stint as one half of the Keene/Taylor Theatre Project – she was unable to get funding for this production. In consequence, the entire cast – from veterans to newcomers from the College of the Arts – and the company at large gave their services voluntarily. Given the quality of what they achieved one can only wonder about the rationale for support for the arts in this country. In Taylor’s production diary (see www.ariettetaylor.com), she explains the funding failure as being due to the play’s being neither new, contemporary nor Australian, but also makes the point that: ‘It’s really interesting that without getting paid for our work, the thing of choice becomes even more pertinent: Our choice to work and on what and with whom.’

The second point about context is the performance space at 45 Flinders Lane. In this long, uncompromising rectangle of a basement room, the actors are never more than a few feet from the audience. They are far too close to get away with any sort of falsity, even if, unimaginably, anyone had been tempted to try to. The spareness of the settings and the utter lack of frills mean that nothing can distract our attention from what the actors are up to. The way Taylor has used this space to create here a crowd, there an isolated figure, or to intensify a colloquy is a miracle of ingenuity, of making difficulties work for her instead of being daunted by them.

Third, the translation. Perhaps one of the reasons it all sounds so painfully truthful is that the actors themselves worked on their lines in collaboration with Natalia Axenova’s literal translation from the Russian. This script has an idiomatic ease acquired without vulgarising but most likely through the scope given to the actors to hone their words, to feel that their performances started with interpretation at the level of translation.

And the result of all this work, of dealing with all these problems as well as with a text of unpopular density? I can only say that, within the first five minutes, I found myself thinking: this is the goods, a production that inspired the rare confidence that comes from listening to actors who understand every nuance of what they are saying. Ensemble notwithstanding, this play will stand or fall on its Ivanov, and in Paul English’s flawless interpretation everything he says and does seems totally to belong to the man. Neither likeable nor dislikeable but merely comprehensible, English’s protagonist is a man of smouldering inner rage and despair, both made worse by his understanding of his condition. When he pulls out the gun and runs off at the end, shocking as this might be to anyone coming to the play for the first time, everything seems to have been leading to just this moment of self-knowledge.

However, this is an ensemble piece and this Ivanov is simply first among equals. He is the constant in a series of oppositions: between him and the foolish hangers-on in his house, played by Alex Menglet (the Count) and Stewart Morritt (the cousin Mischa) with a largeness and fluidity of movement that contrasts with Ivanov’s inner seething and stillness; between him and his prosperous bourgeois neighbours, the tippling Lebedev (a superb study in ineffectual amiability by Malcolm Robertson) and his skinflint wife (Margaret Mills, fussing about candle waste as she seeks to control lives through control of the purse-strings). Then there are three further contrasts central to establishing Ivanov’s anguish. His psychological malaise throws into the sharpest relief the tubercular illness endured by his Jewish wife, played by Helen Morse, surely one of Australia’s best actresses, in a mesmerising display of physical pain exacerbated by awareness of the loss of Ivanov’s love. The confrontations between English and Dan Spielman’s rigorously moral, judgmental doctor shed a clear bright light on the play’s ideological heart, and those between English and Chloe Armstrong’s Sasha, ardent, hopeful and steadfast, are heartbreaking for what they say about possibilities that won’t be realised.

The play’s profundity and complexity get full measure in these performances of exemplary intelligence and intensity, and the whole weight of the play comes forcefully together in the last scene as the wedding guests move en bloc towards Ivanov, freezing as he whips out the gun. Its staging is a coup de théâtre, daring, beautiful and apt. So too is the decision to bring everyone back on for a dance: what does this suggest after the harsh winds of change that have seemed to blow through the play? I’m not sure, but the effect was magical.

I am not in the pay of Ariette Taylor’s company, and, as things are, much good it would do me if I were. I can only say that I can’t wait for its next go at a neglected classic – or a new play. I hope it will be funded, but, if it is, I hope the funding will be used, not for lush production values or upmarket venues but to reward the dedication of the sort of actors who have put this unforgettable experience before us.