LONGING Hampstead Theatre

Novelist William Boyd’s first play merges two short stories by Anton Chekhov – My Life and A Visit to Friends – to produce an enjoyable pastiche which has all the Russian writer’s instantly recognizable and characteristic comic-tragic ingredients. Nina Raine’s production is excellent, the cast is absolutely first-rate, and Lizzie Clachan’s set – a decaying summer house surrounded by silver birch trees – is beautiful. A wastrel (Alan Fox), deeply in debt, is forced to sell his estate to a millionaire arriviste (John Sessions), who intends to give the summer house as a wedding present to his ghastly daughter, who is engaged to a young man who has opted out of society. Can a charismatic lawyer (Iain Glen) from Moscow sort out the financial mess before it is too late? Tamsin Grieg, who plays a hard-working doctor who adores him, manages to convey an enormous amount of sadness just with a gesture or a look. It is good to have another Chekhov play and Longing deserves a much longer shelf life than its brief run at Hampstead.