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Soon their guests – mainly chaps from the garrison – start drifting in, smiling and bearing gifts for Irina’s name-day party.
But a cage can be seen behind them. In Michael Blakemore’s strongly-cast production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the backdrop is a giant steel grille. Designed by Robin Don, this is peculiarly ugly – especially in the closing act when the Prozorov family move into the garden to wave goodbye to the departing soldiers. The mesh is then plastered with what looks like industrial quantities of green phlegm – supposedly representing the foliage of silver birch trees. Obviously, the grille symbolises and magnifies the siblings’ feelings of pent-up frustration as they yearn to leave provincial Russia and return to their native Moscow, to escape dull marriages and their property-grabbing, coarse sister-in-law, Natasha (Susannah Wise). But Don has missed the point that in Chekhov, you discern all this from the minutiae of human behaviour.No matter, much of the acting is excellent. Scott Thomas, making her West End debut with heaps of screen but little stage-work on her CV, proves a riveting and subtle star-player.

Her gaunt, elegant Masha is sharply observed and surprisingly funny – she complains about rude locals yet because she’s nursing bitter disappointment, is outrageously brusque herself. She regards herself as an intellectual but is actually obsessed with her emotional life, so that she’s transformed into a smitten, beaming and flirtatious girl by her affair with Robert Bathurst’s Vershinin. Masha is blind to the fact he’s only an affable bore.James Fleet as her gangly husband Kulygin reminds you how poignant Chekhov’s laughably pedantic schoolmaster is in his persistent, forgiving devotion. Tom Beard’s socially flailing Solyony is notably pitiful as well as dangerously brooding. And Douglas Hodge as the sisters’ once-academically promising brother, Andrei, starts out like a hopelessly cowed schoolboy – plump and flinching – before progressing to moral shabbiness and self-protective pomposity.

Blakemore’s company strikingly conveys the sorry decay of our early passions and ideals with a gathering sense of bleakness and some heartily amusing moments – not least the name-day photograph where everyone suddenly adopts sultry or heroically erect poses round the dinner table.Distinctly awkward and under-worked patches do crop up in this production: I’d give it a couple of weeks to become more polished. Kate Burton as the eldest sister, Olga, could be more tense and exhausted, especially in Act Three where a fire rages in the town and heated rows break out. Also, only Tobias Menzies, as Tufenbach, philosophises with real zest. Christopher Hampton’s new translation includes a few intrusive anachronisms, but mostly it’s fresh and frank.