Theatre - Sheridan Morley finds that two Chekhov productions are just what the doctor ordered

To mark the tenth anniversary of his management of the Donmar, and the beginning of his own farewell to that space, Sam Mendes has a new Uncle Vanya which, in my view, ranks alongside the Olivier-Redgrave staging that I caught as an undergraduate at Chichester 40 years ago.

That was the production which retrieved Olivier's early disasters in Sussex and paved the way to his management of the National Theatre, and it was centrally notable for the twin casting of two of the four greatest actors of their generation.

This time we have three central figures: Simon Russell Beale in the title role, Mendes as director and Brian Friel, whose stunning translation gives us a warmer, funnier, but ultimately more tragic Vanya than any I have seen.

The Mendes company is cross-cast with a Twelfth Night which opens at the Donmar on 11 October, and it is especially strong at the upper end of the age range: David Bradley is craggily magnificent as the treacherous old professor Serebryakov, Selina Cadell and Cherry Morris handle the old bats with style, and Anthony O'Donnell makes of Telegin an unusually central character.

There are also two wonderfully contrasted performances from Emily Watson as the shy, lovelorn Sonya, and Helen McCrory as the chilly, stylish Yelena: the only real disappointment here is Mark Strong's Astrov, a brooding romantic but in no way the match for Vanya. If you are going to remind us, as Simon Russell Beale inevitably does, that Vanya himself is not that far removed from the equally indecisive Hamlet, then you can't have Astrov as Hamlet, too. There must be a sense of a real country doctor, obsessed by his maps of the vanishing forest, but in Mark Strong, it all seems to be for show, as though he has no real beliefs about the land or its people. He seems, in fact, as much of a displaced visitor as the professor, and the balance of those scenes goes oddly adrift.

Thus we are denied the great Vanya-Astrov double act that we had from Albert Finney and the late Leo McKern in Manchester, from Olivier and Redgrave, and more recently from Michael Gambon and Jonathan Pryce. Russell Beale is out there on his own, alternately broody and belligerent, but around him Mendes has achieved a continuity and security of style that are nothing short of magnificent.

There is, not surprisingly, given Mendes's recent Hollywood career, something very cinematic about all of this, as each character gets his or her close-up in the studio intimacy of the Donmar: I'd not want to see this on a much larger stage, but around the long table and below the grassy hedgerows of Anthony Ward's minimal set, something very powerful indeed is going on. You just have to be there.

In a strong week for Chekhov, Ivanov, his first play produced (in 1887), is also the first to detail in any modern sense a man having a nervous breakdown: sure, Hamlet covers some of that territory, but not in a way that would have made any sense to a contemporary psychiatrist - and intriguingly, Freud had just set up shop in Vienna at the time Ivanov was first seen in Moscow.

The new National Theatre revival by Katie Mitchell at the Cottesloe has a lot going for it, once you get past designer Vicki Mortimer's weird decision to frame the stage with white sliding screens uneasily reminiscent of the shower curtains in Psycho. True, Owen Teale does not have quite the charisma of Ralph Fiennes in the Jonathan Kent revival at the Almeida, but he has a fine Welsh rage as he sinks deeper and deeper into the mental breakdown that Chekhov so brilliantly and relentlessly chronicles here.

Around him, Juliet Aubrey as the dying wife, and Philip Voss as an embittered old aristocrat unable to come to terms with the changes already sweeping the Russian agricultural economy, both give superlative performances, as does Robert Bowman who, playing the doctor, is alone able to point out to Ivanov the real cost of his breakdown, not only to himself but to those who get caught up in his wake.

Never forget that Chekhov was a doctor: like Freud, he would have seen people in varying stages of mental breakdown, some of whom may have thought their symptoms were physical, and he is wonderfully able to pinpoint through the four acts of Ivanov the various stages of depression as it goes from something almost incidental to something that overwhelms all else.

The clues are all there, and Ivanov himself seems to notice most of them: the trouble is that others don't, and what might have been a bleak comedy becomes a tragedy, thereby neatly foreshadowing everything that Chekhov was later to write.

Uncle Vanya is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC1 (020 7369 1732) in rep with Twelfth Night until 20 November (day seats and returns only). Ivanov is at the Cottesloe, National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000) until 12 October

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