Ivanov, National Theatre, Cottesloe, London

Beset, on his wedding day, by friends, relatives, and hangers-on telling him what his problem is, an exasperated Mikhail Ivanov says: "This isn't a wedding – it's a public trial!" Long before, however, Ivanov has already brought in a guilty verdict on himself. When the play begins, he is five years married to a woman he no longer loves, unable to pay even the interest on a loan needed to prop up his failing estate, and thrashing about in depression and self-disgust. As the play ends, his wife has been dead for a year, and he is about to be remarried – to a wealthy and beautiful woman who adores him. True to form, though, he is determined to wrest failure from the jaws of success.

Vicki Mortimer's set emphasises the narrowness and imprisonment of Ivanov's existence. A narrow strip of stage, sparsely furnished, is flanked by rows of seats, so that one stares across it at half the audience. The action, though, is sufficiently engrossing to make one ignore them. Brilliantly white screens glide along each long side of the stage, slowly revealing the imprisoned inhabitants and slowly, like hospital partitions, shutting out a tableau of horror at the end of Acts Two and Four.

The ensemble playing of Katie Mitchell's cast is excellent, each actor contributing to the symphony of dissonance that characterises this slice of late-19th-century provincial Russia, where the energetic are constantly infuriated by frustration and the idle are bored to dementia.

The only ones unaffected by the prevailing accidie are the stupid and petty, such as Zinaida, the local moneylender, too dense to see either the neighbours' contempt or the irony of her sneering at Ivanov for marrying a Jew without a dowry. There are intense performances from Robert Bowman as the doctor so indignant at Ivanov's mistreatment of his wife that he loses everyone's sympathy, and from Indira Varma as Sasha, whose love for the unresponsive Ivanov is expressed in a mixture of entreaty and harangue. A bit less aggression from her, however, might make it more apparent that Sasha's so-called "active love" is merely narcissism and maternal instinct.

As Ivanov, Owen Teale is good at conveying the character's despair, his integrity perverted into self-loathing. A sturdy, bluff actor, however, with features that are not very mobile, he does not engage the audience's sympathies or make us believe that the most eligible woman in the county would throw herself at his feet. For this slightest of Chekhov's plays to work, the title part really needs to be cast with an actor of romantic good looks and charm, or at least one who conveys an idealistic, dreamy eccentricity.

As the penniless Count Shabelsky, however, Philip Voss might be Ivanov 30 years on. Alternately ingratiating, whimpering and viperish, this fine actor shows us that, if you live in Russia, suicide might well be redundant.

To 12 October (020-7452 3000)