SECOND HOMES WITH ENDLESS ANGST AND RUSSIAN CACKLING

Set in Imperial Russia, this is prestige theatre on the grandest scale, from Peter McKintosh’s soaring set (a hollow timber frame home spectacularly transforming into a woodland clearing surrounded by a stream) to the sprawling, lavishly costumed, superb cast.

- With STEFAN KYRIAZIS

SUMMERFOLK✰✰✰ NATIONAL THEATRE, UNTIL APRIL 29 nationaltheatre.org.uk

Last staged in the UK in 1999, it clocked in at almost four hours. That's a lot of Slavic angst. This new adaptation by siblings Nina and Moses Raine is an hour shorter, but still feels too long.

Fervent socialist Maxim Gorky wrote it in 1904 as a riposte to Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, where impoverished aristos having shallow existential crises sell their land to the new grasping middle-classes.

Now these first-generation rich have destroyed the orchards to build flashy rural second homes, where some wallow in ennui and, yup, existential angst.

The rest (mainly men) smugly bluster. None are happy.

They bitch and bicker, gossip, have affairs, affect airs and resolutely refuse to remember their roots or help those they've left behind, blithely blind that the 1905 revolution looms while 1917 will wipe them out.

Boorish bully Sergei (Paul Ready) cackles at everything. His wanly aloof wife Varvara (Sophie Rundle, fabulous) lolls languidly, peevishly annoyed at everyone for fancying her.

Everyone moans they are bored, lonely, ugly, old, unloved, unlovable, without purpose. It's so Russian, so Chekhovian. There's even a gun.

One suitor tries and ludicrously fails to top himself.

The Raines mine constant humour from the source material. Discussing The Cherry Orchard, one character deadpans: "Went on too long.