Brian Friel, in this derivation from Turgenev, stylishly staged by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, uses words more playfully than in most of his own original works.

The characters use ideas and emotions playfully to create dramatic transactions and move the narrative along. And, under Michael Attenborough's skilled direction, one is conscious of highly professional actors playing their parts. But the pervasive sense of playfulness does not ultimately help the audience to get far beneath the surface of either the plot or the characters so that we end up with something like an anti-romantic comedy, ephemeral in the memory if not in time itself.

Sara Stewart is the manipulative Natalya Petrovna, wife of the busy Arkady Sergeyevic Islayev (Darrell D'Silva) in whom she appears to have little interest. Sam Graham is Michel Aleksandrovich Rak itin, Arkady's old friend, who is Natalya's dull lovelorn lapdog. But it is the young student, Aleksey Nikolayevich Belyayev (Jack Tarlton), come to tutor Natalya's young ward, Vera Aleksandrovna, with whom Natalya falls in love. And so does Vera.

Something's got to give, and it is not likely to be Arkady's widowed mother Anna (Janet Whiteside) nor her seemingly fluttery companion Lizaveta (Elaine Pyke), nor yet the local joke-cracking match-making doctor Ignaty Ilyich Shpigelsky (Lloyd Hutchinson) who is busy pressing the case of Vera's would-be suitor (the neighbouring ageing landowner Bolshintsov, played by Michael Loughnan).

The Irishness of Friel's version is nicely pointed by the adoption of a generic Irish inflection in the speech of this mostly English company, and by the use of John Field's works as appropriate incidental music. It is entertaining and often genuinely infectiously funny, and certainly worth seeing. But it remains elusively less substantial than one fancies it ought to be.

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