Ian Rickson strikes a cheeky note by signing off his career as artistic director of this home for new writing with that familiar classic Chekhov's The Seagull - but in a historic production.

The play's two young sexual obsessives, Mackenzie Crook's suicidal writer Konstantin and Carey Mulligan's doomed, would-be actress Nina, make their characters' despair overwhelming.

It felt, while I watched with tell-tale moist eyes, that I was seeing this tragi-comedy for the first time. And Christopher Hampton's new version, with its stock of freshminted turns of phrase, enhances the sense of watching something new.

Rickson organises a series of shocks for traditional Chekhov lovers.

First he gives the play strong socialpolitical pointing. He strips away The Seagull's luxurious and romantic accessories. No lake, gardens, lawns or flower-beds establish a seductive country-estate mood.

Hildegard Bechtler's handsome design is something different. Inside, the dining room with peeling, grey walls and sparse furniture, and outside, a forlorn pair of birch trees and a grey back wall, remind us that Sorin's estate and the life of the landed gentry is fading out in bleak poverty.

A little laughter is raised, but mainly of the ironic, rueful sort.

Unrequited love fixes almost everyone in a vice of hopeless longing: Katherine Parkinson's Masha and Denise Black as her jealous mother both pining for unavailable men, Art Malik's semi-detached Dr Dorn, Pearce Quigley's unwanted husband Medvedenko all powerfully increase the tragi-comic mood. Only Peter Wight's histrionic Sorin sounds out of place.

Kristin Scott Thomas's glacial Arkadina, the actress with a secondrate touring career well behind her and that reluctant lover of hers, Trigorin, to whom Chiwetel Ejiofor tenatively lends the air of an older toy-boy novelist rather than the usual, middle-aged literary gentleman, remain shadowy catalysts. They yield the central focus to Nina and Konstantin.

Ejiofor betrays not a flicker of sexual desire when he makes his moves upon Mulligan's smitten Nina. A subdued Scott Thomas, discreetly emanating superior sex-appeal, floats around in 19th-century chic costumes, oozing froideur and flaunting her ego.

When she vainly tries to surrender to temperament or reclaim Trigorin she looks and sound squawkily unconvincing. Even when rowing with Konstantin she betrays the aloof grandeur of minor royalty opening a provincial railway station rather than a mother up against a jealous son.

This relentlessly one-noted performance ignores the fact that Arakadinahas has a compassionate side as well as selfish one and it is on her maternal aspect that Konstantin depends. Yet oddly Scott Thomas's limitations serve only to make Crook's Konstantin appear more pathetically isolated and his transition from TV comedian to serious actor more amazing.

What a blaze of desperate intensity he brings to his hopeless wooing of Mulligan's ardent, vulnerable Nina. Eyes fixed in a distant stare, shimmering with passion, the desolate, bearded Konstantin promises early on to kill himself and the threat for once sounds like an assured prophecy.

I have never seen the last Nina-Konstantin encounter better done. Mulligan piles on the pathos as an eerily mature, sexually obsessed Nina.

She speaks the lines from Konstantin's modernist play while he blocks his ears to the sound. This enthralling Seagull becomes, in Rickson's beautiful swan-song production, a drama of destruction.

It demonstrates how two narcissistic artist/lovers, teeming with self-interest wreck the lives of their younger counter-parts.