There’s a moment in Chekhov’s first great play when the novelist Trigorin scribbles notes for a story suggested by the seagull that pretty young Nina’s would-be lover, Konstantin, has shot in a fit of jealousy. His subject will be a girl who lives happily by a lake, like the bird, and is casually destroyed by a passing man.

For those who know how Trigorin will behave the line always reverberates, but here more than usual. Romola Garai beams with delight at inspiring the writer whom she admires, not knowing that the seagull beside her will be her.

Trevor Nunn’s revival is packed with nice detail. He also never forgets that Chekhov called the play a comedy. There’s a lovely performance from Ian McKellen in the relatively small role of Sorin, the lake-house’s ageing, sickening owner and a man who wryly, fatalistically, poignantly, hilariously accuses himself of having squandered his existence. From his mouth a line such as “I want some life and that’s why I have sherry with my dinner” leaves you in stitches. Likewise with Monica Dolan’s black-clad Masha, a pale, ungainly girl who takes lugubrious pleasure in being a lovelorn alcoholic.

As the actress Arkadina, Konstantin’s neglectful mother, Frances Barber ( pictured with McKellen) scores too. You suspect that she doesn’t know if she means lines such as (said of Konstantin) “somebody tell me the matter with my son”, for she tends to deliver them as if they belonged in a Jacobean classic. Her habit is to ham up one sentence, then expose her unconcern by offhandedly dropping the next, as (of Nina) “that poor girl! No really.” She’s tactile, brassy, overbearing, narcissistic but perhaps to be pitied, for more than one shriek or screech expresses the nerves of an older woman who fears losing young Trigorin to the younger Nina.

Trigorin is Gerald Kyd, an introvert brought back to life when Garai’s Nina inadvertently shows him how dead and driven he’s become. Garai herself is perhaps too much the artless, childish celeb-worshipper at the start, but she rises to the emotional challenge of the final scene, as, more quietly, does Richard Goulding’s Konstantin, a nervy, intense, rather bitter youth, whose newly acquired maturity turns out to have its decided limits. Is Nunn right to show Masha, who adores him as much as he despises her, ensuring that he botches his first suicide attempt, as Chekhov doesn’t? Perhaps.

The Seagull may be a comedy, but we leave this revival aware that it’s also about failure, pain, loss, disaster.

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