In The Cherry Orchard Gayev addresses a bookcase, embarrassing everyone as he lauds its antiquity. In Philistines, which Gorky wrote three years earlier, an embittered boy talks to a cupboard, but this time with anger at its age, its stupidity, its failure “to move an inch in 18 years” – and, as becomes clear, the same woodenness that characterises his own petit-bourgeois family.

It’s a comparison that sums up the difference between the master and his disciple. Where Chekhov offered wry satiric observation, Gorky was more biting, more upfront with his anger. Philistines is Chekhovian in its quirky detail, but Gorkyesque in its sharp-eyed portrait of a small-town family that’s passive, self-pitying and/or hostile in the face of the changes that, this being 1901, are stirring outside.

No wonder the authorities banned it. But no wonder Chekhov admired what was, in fact, Gorky’s first play. “Sure to be gripping from the first act,” he declared, and Howard Davies’s splendidly observant, atmospheric revival proves him right. Right, even though Philistines sprawls and the dialogue criss-crosses Bunny Christie’s set in ultra-naturalistic fashion. Right, even though Gorky’s socialist exasperation sometimes seems repetitive.

The head of the clan, Phil Davis’s sour-faced old Vassily, is mean, petty-minded, antiSemitic and jealous of his supposedly overeducated children: Ruth Wilson’s Tanya, who turns suicidal in despair at her loveless, unfulfilling life, and Rory Kinnear’s Pyotr, whose reaction to being thrown out of university for political activism is nervily to mooch and moan. All three are compared with Vassily’s foster-son, Mark Bonnar’s Nil, who despises their narcissistic individualism and plans to strive for a shining future.

Nil is the play’s strongest character but, from the stance of 2007, also its weakest link. Yet Gorky brings him alive, as he does everyone, down to the balefully alcoholic lodger (Conleth Hill) and grumpy cook (Maggie McCarthy), whose reaction to crisis is to rush to save the cabbage soup. And by the end we don’t need lines like Nil’s “if you’re bored, do something” to read Gorky’s runes – 1905 is coming. So is 1917.

Box office: 020-7452 3000

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette