Patrick Gibson, Sophie Okonedo and Alistair Petrie in A Month in the Country [Helen Murray]

WHEN Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright Ivan Turgenev premiered his domestic tragicomedy, A Month in the Country, in 1872, its lack of plot and definitive leading character bewildered audience and critics. But he was an earlier pioneer of a form of drama that Anton Chekhov made his own.

A wealthy family are summering in the country. Natalya Petrovna (an imperious Sophie Okonedo) is quick to dismiss others’ feelings and takes for granted the two men who love her. Her husband Arkady Islayev (Thomas Arnold) keeps himself busy constructing a weir, while family friend and Natalya’s confidante, Michel (a cleverly understated Alistair Petrie), reads to her, hiding his longing behind a mannered exterior.

Isolated and bored, Natalya falls for her son’s young tutor, Aleksei (Patrick Gibson) who has also attracted the interest of 17-year-old Vera (Rachelle Diedericks), the Islayevs’ ward. Natalya demonstrates her ruthlessness in the speed with which she extinguishes Vera’s potential happiness.

It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but Brian Friel’s eloquent adaptation brings home the various frustrations of the idle rich and their lack of purpose. The servants (Jessica Brindle and Jonathan Livingstone) have their own passions to navigate and, together with German tutor Herr Schaaf (Mark Hadfield), provide much of the play’s humour.

There’s a real sense of the stagnation of the Russian land-owning class, each character nursing their own obsessions, often wilfully ignorant of the wider picture. It’s beautifully paced and elegantly staged by Lyndsey Turner – Leslie Travers’s verdant glass greenhouse, des­cending between scene changes, evokes the rural emotional prison the characters find themselves in.

Warmly recommended.

Until October 3
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