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

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.