Nina Raine’s production captures Chekhov’s distinctive mixture of heartache and comedy and Lizzie Clachan’s lovely autumnal design of a decayed summerhouse in an autumnal country estate conjures the Chekhovian mood perfectly.

The best scenes involve Iain Glen as the lawyer, who like Chekhov himself seems terrified of attachment, and Tamsin Greig as the doctor friend who has long held a torch for him. Their scenes together create a truly Chekhovian atmosphere of rueful longing and the cruel inequality of love.

Eve Ponsonby is also touching as the young Natasha who feels pressured to make a lucrative marriage to save the family from disaster.

Nina Raines’s production achieves some virtuosic flourishes during a riotous party in the summer house, at which the feckless husband, played with a memorably toxic mixture of pomposity, foolishness and malice by Alan Cox, gets disastrously drunk, while John Sessions suggests much of the rough vigour of the wealthy engineer.

 

William Boyd has fused two Chekhov stories from the 1890s, A Visit to Friends and My Life, to create a new play. The result is inevitably something of a hybrid: neither pure Boyd nor pure Chekhov. But it works because it deals with eternal Russian themes – and because it is performed with rare musical precision.

Nina Raine’s production gains immeasurably from luxury casting. Iain Glen is remarkable as Kolia, suggesting a man who – possibly like Chekhov himself – combines effortless charm and emotional ruthlessness. Tamsin Greig, as the middle-aged doctor clearly besotted by him, subtly evokes the quiet anguish of the unfulfilled heart. And there is a clutch of fine performances from Alan Cox as the alcoholic Sergei, Natasha Little as his despairing wife and William Postlethwaite as the well-born Misail who has a Tolstoyan urge to identify with the workers.

A new Chekhov play, Longing, has been created by novelist William Boyd from two of the Russian author’s short stories and given a wonderfully skilled and well-cast production byNina Raine that certainly looks Chekhovian.

Designer Lizzie Clachan provides silver birches and sycamore, birdsong (tits and blackbirds), a colourful betrothal party, samovars and brandy bottles, and a delightful summer house in the wooded corner of a run-down country estate.

The play is tilted towards a melancholic nearly-reunion of Kolia and Varia, and it’s expertly, very touchingly played, with no swooning or sentiment, by Glen (last year’s outstanding Uncle Vanya) and Greig. The young girls, too, are exceptionally good, and Cox andSessions fill out their contrasting studies in irresponsible alcoholic bonhomie and go-getting, landscape-changing interference with great gusto.