"All this unhappiness, what's it all for?" howls Irina at the end of Chekhov's 100-year-old drama. What indeed. And what purpose does this Chichester revival serve?
It's directed by Loveday Ingram, a recent signing to the Royal Shakespeare Company who has already mastered its bloodlessly proficient house style. This is moneyed and elegant Chekhov, studded with fine performances and with nothing remotely urgent or exciting to communicate. The absence is filled, as ever, by that bane of theatre: wistfulness.
The problems begin with the play. It's not easy to render dynamic this account of three frustrated high-society sisters wilting in a provincial town. Listen to Chekhov: "Its mood is duller than dull." His elegiac existentialism is less meatily dramatised here than elsewhere. In the words of the lovesick Masha, it's "talk, talk, talk, nothing but talk the whole day long".
Much of that talk is clunkily delivered in speeches to mirrors or convenient servants. A tranche of the supposed tragedy derives from a sudden and arbitrary duel. Brian Friel's 1981 translation offers flashes of "vernacular vulgarity" (as Natasha calls it) amid the genteel chat.
Designer Colin Falconer flecks his stately country house with Oriental overtones. Ingram struggles, meanwhile, to disperse the clouds of gloom that gather over her production.
Chekhov punctures his characters' self-pity with humour. "I'll soon be 24," sobs Irina, "and what do I have to show for it?" There are laughs in this revival, but not when they're needed: at the moments of highest tragedy, where they might dispel the sense that Ingram is indulging the characters' pomposity.
We're left with a self-important wallow in what we're encouraged to see as life's inevitable misery, to which the intelligent viewer's response will be: oh, come on, it's not that bad.
It takes Michael Siberry's stoic, generous Vershinin to remind us that tragedy is most involving when it befalls active optimists, not passive solipsists. In an otherwise competent cast, Janie Dee provides sparks of life as Vershinin's illicit squeeze Masha.
It's with their love triangle (with Ian Gelder's twittering buffoon, Kulygin) that Chekhov most successfully animates his idea that the suppression of dreams wreaks emotional devastation. The dramatic exercise of that perspective should be to enthral, provoke or enrage its audience.
In this production, we're made to feel mildly sympathetic for a gaggle of breast-beating toffs whose unhappiness seems largely self-inflicted.
In rep until September 29. Box office: 01243 781312.
