The Russians, it has often been noted, approach Chekhov in a vastly different manner than the way English theatre-makers do.

While a home-grown production of The Cherry Orchard might be full of laughs, a British take on Chekhov is likely to make heavy classicist weather of the playwright's pre-absurdist ennui. Whether the same reverence applies to Russian directors when taking on Shakespeare's canon remains to be seen, as wunderkind Dmitry Krymov arrives at the Edinburgh International Festival this week with his version of the ultimate seasonal rom-com, A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In an EIF theatre season that is awash with reinvented classics, Krymov's Dream has been brought to Edinburgh via the Moscow-based Chekhov International Theatre Festival and Krymov's own Laboratory School of Art Theatre Production.

However, the production was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has just previewed it over nine days as part of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival.

Unlike what one might suspect from a pukkah-voiced RSC show, however, Krymov's emphasis will be on a visual reimagining of the play, which looks set to incorporate life-size puppets made from a Frankenstein's monster-style jumble of sources that lend a collage-like feel to the production.

"The idea came from the RSC," Krymov says via a translator of his new production's genesis. "I was very happy to receive the invitation, and it was one I couldn't refuse. The main thing for me was, as the play was written so long ago, how I deal with it now and appreciate it for today.

"I had very little to do. I don't know anything about love with donkeys, but Shakespeare is a genius. He writes about the same things in different plays, but in opposite ways, so a phenomenon can be seen as tragedy and comedy. This gives you plenty of opportunities to play with these ideas."

Which, to all intents and purposes, is what Krymov's Laboratory was set up to do. Even its existence in its current form came about more by accident than design.

"The Laboratory was made by chance," says Krymov. "It was initially a course for set design at the Moscow Academy, but then first-year students started making their own productions. Many became set designers, but now there are graduates who become actors and form companies as well."

In spirit, then, his work sounds more akin to performance and live art interventions that grew out of art schools in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now, as then, developing such a form of total theatre rooted in design faced considerable resistance from dyed-in-the-wool institutions more used to individual artforms being compartmentalised.

As the son of director Anatoly Efros and critic Natalia Krymova, Krymov has been steeped in theatre his entire life. However, it was design he turned to first and, after graduating from the Moscow Art Theatre Studio-School in 1976, he worked with his father for nine years at the Taganka Theatre, Moscow, where Efros was artistic director until his death in 1987.

For the next 13 years Krymov designed more than 100 productions, in Russia, France and Japan.

As the collapse of the Berlin Wall presaged the collapse of Communism in 1990, Krymov turned his back on the theatre to become a full-time artist, and his paintings hang in numerous museums and private collections around the world.

He returned to the theatre only in 2002 when he joined the Russian University of Theatre Arts, working in the design department. Only then did he try his hand at directing via a production of Hamlet.

Two years later, Krymov began his bold new curriculum, which resulted in the sorts of self-generated productions that led to the formation of his Laboratory.

The acclaim that resulted from his more holistic approach to making theatre via cross-artform methodology raised eyebrows in some quarters, although Krymov continues to work with his students in this way to this day.

This year alone, the laboratory has produced four shows which have utilised a mixed-media approach alongside the work of young Russian composers.

Of all of Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream has lent itself to more wild interpretations than any other.

Both Peter Brook's seminal post-hippy 1970 production and Peter Hall's take on the play two years before were produced by the RSC.

In a way, Krymov's version is getting back to the free-form radicalism of the arts labs that influenced both his predecessors. Yet he goes even further, his influences ranging from the Polish guru Tadeusz Kantor to icons of the Russian avant garde who so influenced post-modern theatre today.

Krymov's Dream, then, looks set to be an irreverent and audacious set of actions influenced as much by art history as a theatrical one as it bursts into life. One thing it most certainly won't be is faithful to received ideas of Shakespeare.

"We don't aim to become Englishmen or behave like English people," Krymov says.

"We remain ourselves in order to make it the most exciting theatre production that we can.

"When Americans do Chekhov, they don't pretend to be Russians, and so we too keep our own identity."

A Midsummer Night's Dream (As You Like It), King's Theatre, August 24-25, 7.30pm; August 26, 2.30pm. Visit www.eif.co.uk