IN THE past few days your reviewer has become a critical borzoi, nostrils flaring as he tracks the elusive Chekhov: Chichester for Pimlott’s Seagull, Edinburgh for Stein’s Seagull, and now the National for the second major Three Sisters London has seen this summer. It’s proof, not just of the dramatist’s fascination, but also of the many different ways you can interpret him. It would take another Cheka to pin down Chekhov.

Katie Mitchell’s revival is more Stein than Pimlott. It’s a bit slow but always pensive and penetrating. More than any Three Sisters I recall, it contrasts laughter with what comes after: hope and delight with frustration and disillusion. The nameday party for the youngest Prozorov sister, Anna Maxwell Martin’s enchanting Irina, couldn’t open the play more joyously. There’s even a gloriously chatty guest in the person of Ben Daniels’s genial Vershinin. But three-odd hours later the girl is on her knees, robbed of a fiancé and a future. The route between these points is mapped with Mitchell’s usual subtlety. The childish games that brightened the house during the life of General Prozorov, clearly an influential and maybe an infantilising father, fade and falter. The sisters happily prepare for the arrival of mummers, improvising a ballet spoof, but the mummers don’t stay and, ominously, it’s the dying swan that’s spoofed. Irina herself opens a music box, and that’s no fun either.

With brother Andrei’s unlovely wife gradually colonising the Prozorov home, how could it be? Early on, a visiting officer photographs Irina’s party. Not only do we see his work on a screen that shifts from sepia to sombre black, the actors intermittently freeze, as if in a photo themselves. Poignantly yet pointedly, this emphasises that the sisters find it easier to live in the past and dream of the future than cope with the present, and it is, I suppose, Mitchell’s most obvious innovation. Yet her production’s main strength is its careful delineation of relationships, including some that often get neglected.

Take Martin’s deeply uneasy relationship with Patrick Godfrey’s Chebutykin, who half pretends he’s her real father, and, worse, with Tim McMullan’s scary Solyony, who is close to being her sexual stalker. Take the edgy bond between Eve Best’s vulnerable Masha and her schoolmaster-husband, Angus Wright’s Kulygin. Usually, he’s just a smug bore, whom she easily rejects for Vershinin. Here, he’s formidable enough for us to see why she married him — and still finds him intimidating if dull.

The pay-off comes in the final scene: Daniels gone, Best unable to hide her awful pain, Wright gently comforting her. It’s extremely moving — and wholly Chekhovian.

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