It’s nearly 25 years since Stephen Poliakoff’s play, inspired by the experiences of his grandfather’s family, had its premiere in an RSC production. Its first major revival, directed by Esther Richardson, proves the work to be filled with enduring interest; its themes of memory and of history refracted through individual lives have become Poliakoff hallmarks. But while Richardson’s staging displays a sensitivity to the absurdities that can arise from extreme circumstances, it suffers from a shortage of tonal variety and theatrical impact.

In post-Revolutionary Russia, the Pesiakoffs, a well-to-do Jewish family, are turfed out of their comfortable Moscow home and resettled in a dilapidated railway carriage. Nikolai (Philip Bretherton), the fastidious head of the household, is ordered under Lenin’s new regime to become a regional telephone-line examiner, a position that involves the family trundling from one bleak or bandit-infested backwater to another, in their cramped, vermin-infested new quarters. But Nikolai’s lively mind is concerned not with telephones but with communication of a different kind: he is developing the process by which sound can be recorded on film. Ironically, preoccupied with that ground-breaking work, he is wilfully deaf and blind to developments within his family and beyond the carriage’s bullet-hole riddled walls.

The writing hums with resonance. The necessity of honouring the past without becoming trapped there emerges powerfully, and sociological change is vividly suggested in the family’s shifting relationships. Nikolai’s wife Eugenia (Diana Kent), permitted to work for the first time, finds a release from years of stifling bourgeois marital frustration. Their former servant Polya (Celia Meiras) gradually sheds her subordinate status. Their son, Ilan Goodman’s gawky Sasha, grows from a cossetted boy into an anxious young man whose privileged upbringing makes him feel an imposter in his home country.

Nikolai, meanwhile, clings to the old ways that gave him status in Moscow society, throwing a farcical candlelit dinner party in the carriage, unashamedly sporting his expensive clothes and endangering the entire family’s lives with his flouting of Soviet authority and his absorption in a scientific discovery that he dreams will make and record history.

Yet even as the shadow of Stalin looms, Richardson’s production never darkens sufficiently to suggest either personal or political crisis. The acting, a hammily played pair of guards aside, is competent, but the pace is ponderous and there’s a tension-sapping absence of passion. Jamie Vartan’s hefty steam-filled set looks impressive, but Richardson’s staging is diffuse, characters seeming barely to connect, physically or emotionally. We scarcely feel the intensity of Nikolai’s obsession, the fear and frustrations of Eugenia and Sasha, or the terrors of encroaching totalitarianism. The play’s extraordinary journey deserves to traverse much more colourful, dramatic country.

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