Vanya at the Gate, W11

An agonising, slow-motion vision of four lives softly imploding: that’s the sight offered in Sam Holcroft’s distillation of Chekhov. Natalie Abrahami’s finely acted production, ingeniously designed by Tom Scutt, encases the tormented quartet of central characters from Uncle Vanya in a room-sized, rotating packing crate tellingly marked FRAGILE. There, lonely Sonya, her ailing father’s beautiful wife Yelena, pompous doctor Astrov, who Sonya loves and unhappy Yelena is attracted to, and Sonya’s ferociously depressed uncle, obsessively impassioned with Yelena, perform a dance of impending death and emotional torture.

This is not an elegant spectacle: Holcroft’s text, which skilfully elides elements of Chekhov’s plot, is peppered with slang and swearing and, in the mouth of Robert Goodale’s bitter Vanya , often becomes savage. But that startling effectiveness is offset by a tendency towards the trite: the playwright’s reimagining of Chekhov’s monologues serves up inner turmoil in sloppy shovelfuls of sentiment that contrast uncomfortably with the dialogue’s brisk acidity. And there’s little here, beyond the stylistic alterations and a pitiless approach to the figure of Astrov, that attentiveness to the original play’s subtext wouldn’t reveal. But where Holcroft and Abrahami succeed is in intensifying and laying bare the quiet, deadly damage we inflict on one another and ourselves, and as an audience we devour these behind-closed-doors scenes with the voracity of a peeping tom.