Remember Gus the Theatre Cat in T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats? He says that he has acted with Irving, he’s acted with Tree but his proudest moment ‘was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell’. Well, Herbert Beerbohm Tree was the original Higgins in Pygmalion, and Sir Henry Irving the greatest actor on the Victorian stage. All of which comes to mind because there’s a new play by David Hare, Grace Pervades, in which Ralph Fiennes plays Irving and one of his great stage partners, Ellen Terry, is played by Miranda Raison (from Spooks).

It’s on in Bath and it transfers to the Haymarket in April. If you want a sense of Terry’s presence have a look at John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her as Lady Macbeth. She was a formidable dame who toured Australia and New Zealand at the age of 66. And if you want to hear what she was like in appropriately dazzling company listen to the recording of Peggy Ashcroft doing her letters to the greatest playwright of her day, Shaw, who’s played by that marvellous Irish actor, Cyril Cusack.

The lustre and the poignancy of the theatre are all about us at the moment, not least because of The Orchard at the Malthouse where the meta theatre kids of Pony Cam do a lively routine about what to do with the cherry orchard when you can’t quote Chekhov or do anything but gesture with headings or remote thematic paraphrases at what it’s all about. The knowing theatre audience laughed like drains but any youngster who doesn’t know The Cherry Orchard would be quite at sea.

It’s an old trick to ask people what the greatest play of the twentieth century is because everyone tends to forget that The Cherry Orchard (the last of the four great Chekhov tragicomedies) was actually first performed in 1904.

If you want dazzling productions of it they abound. Charlotte Rampling as Ranyevskaya with Alan Bates as her brother Gayev directed by Michael Cacoyannis. There’s one from 1981 with Judi Dench in the star role of Ranevskaya. But The Cherry Orchard with the highest reputation is the 1962 Stratford one with our Ellen Terry impersonator Dame Peggy Ashcroft as Ranevskaya, Sir John Gielgud as the billiards-obsessed brother, Dorothy Tutin as Varya, the manager, Ian Holm as Trofimov the perpetual student, and Judi Dench as the young Anya. It’s on YouTube and it has an incomparable lustre and truth. Everything is falling apart but they can’t work out what to do with the cherry orchard, despite the advice of the yob made good, and they can’t light a fire between Varya and Lopakhin.

It is the most comprehensive image of life Chekhov gives us in the plays and Peggy Ashcroft has a preternatural poise in all her grief for her dead son, for the men who have stolen from her and broken her heart with their love of lucre and liquor. The very idea of money is a preposterous absurdity to this hapless old aristocrat and Ashcroft and Gielgud capture the futility of their predicament with a ravishing irony and grace.

But God-given versions of Chekhov abound, Vanessa Redgrave as Nina in Sidney Lumet’s film of The Seagull, the Uncle Vanya with Olivier, Michael Redgrave and Joan Plowright with Dame Sybil Thorndike (Shaw’s original Saint Joan) as the nurse. Then there’s the BBC Radio Three Sisters with Paul Scofield staggering as Vershinin and Wilfred Lawson as the doctor who hums about sitting on his tomb, and Lynn Redgrave as Irena.

In 1991 the Melbourne Festival sported a Seagull from the Moscow Arts Theatre as expensive as a Cameron McIntosh musical with the great Russian Hamlet, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, as Doctor Dorn.

No one who saw it will ever forget Helen Morse in Ivanov. And returning to Ralph Fiennes it’s great to hear that the man who recorded Eliot’s Four Quartets with all its symbolism and spiritual quest should be directing As You Like It and that Harriet Walter is appearing with him as Jacques delivering ‘all the world’s a stage’.

All of this is a world away from The 39 Steps which starts its Melbourne revival on Wednesday, 10 September. It’s famously based not on John Buchan’s superbly crafted thriller but on Hitchcock’s film (in which Peggy Ashcroft has a small role). It’s one of those alternative versions, an adaptation which is superior to the original. The original Australian production of The 39 Steps was by the great Maria Aitken who gave it a lightning speed and co-ordination. What can any of this have to do with Tom Wright’s Troy? It’s funny but natural enough that Tom – one of the smartest people ever to grace a theatre company – should have ended up with the same title as Wolfgang Petersen did for the Brad Pitt film: it was gratifying to hear Peter O’Toole’s voice as Priam King of Troy.

Wright is going to have Ian Michael the Sydney Theatre Company resident director who has worked with Kip Williams on the cine-theatre caper. Danny Ball is doubling as Achilles and Apollo, Paula Arundell is Hecuba and Lyndon Watts is both Achilles’ intimate Patroclus and Helen of Troy.

There are times with the Homer of The Iliad when you want the starkness of the language. Is this one reason why the asyntactical blobs of colour and rhetorical excitement of Robert Fagles’ version are being replaced by the blank verse of Emily Wilson? Isn’t it plainness we want in the meeting of Priam and Achilles: Achilles says, ‘They say old man that you too were happy once,’ and Priam says, ‘For I have done what no man ever did. I have lifted my hand in friendship to the killer of my son.’

All of this may seem a long way from the Impressionist exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria which has been hailed as its best show for years because it captures the musing introspection of a new-found world in everyone from Monet down. Chekhov and the author of Gus the Theatre Cat have a place in this story.

Anyone pining for Father’s Day presents could greedily demand the new edition of Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 10: 1942–1944 which annotate the world with what sounds like a labyrinthine brilliance. If you want a bit of light relief try Hotel Ukraine by the master of Gorky Park Martin Cruz Smith who died the other week.