It may be fun to act in this 90-minute piece, but it’s excruciatingly boring to sit through it. Chris Goode’s adaptation of Chekhov’s play would be incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t know the original: it’s like a laborious in-joke for aficionados, a pretentious, self-indulgent and self-admiring theatre game. Six actors (one man, five women) play all the roles, and they keep exchanging them, so you never quite know who is who. This suggests that plays don’t need characters, only voices, no matter whose. Some of it, possibly improvised, is not in Chekhov. The clothes are more or less period, but the props are mostly modern. A radio blazes 1930s songs, the actors sing Yellow Submarine, and there’s some tedious minimalist music. There are also visual jokes comprehensible only to card-carrying Chekhovians. Towards the end, a plump live rabbit with black spots, like a deformed dalmatian, comes on and potters about: guaranteed, especially in an English theatre, to take the attention from the play. This is not an adaptation, but an adolescent game with witless ideas, a piece of pseudo-intellectual deconstruction that comes across as an unsophisticated parody. I hope it will soon make its way into the dustbin of theatre history.

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