Three Days in the Country, National Theatre

The trouble with the classics is that they are long, complex and difficult. But today’s sensibility favours the quick, simple and easy. So it is no surprise that the National Theatre have opened its doors to Patrick Marber, who has taken Ivan Turgenev’s 1850s play, A Month in the Country, and given it a makeover. After all, in its uncut original version it runs for four hours.

The result is what the Amazon website calls an “unfaithful version”, which is shorter and simpler than the original. Turgenev’s month of rural love, lust and despair has been distilled down to some 72 hours. But does this version, which stars Mark Gatiss and John Simm, work as a play?

Often called a Chekhovian drama written a generation before Chekhov, Turgenev’s play is set in a country estate and features a collection of irresolute gentry spending the languorous summer months together. The plot is an interlocking series of stories of love: the household is headed by Arkady, who is an improving landlord, and Natalya. Their marriage is arid so Natalya is having a long but unconsummated relationship with Rakitin, Arkady’s best friend. When a young tutor, Belyaev, arrives, Natalya falls head-over-heels in love with him. But then so does Vera, her 17-year-old ward. For his part, Belyaev is more drawn to Katya, a maid.

The keynote of the writing is its stress on comic absurdity

Add to this a host of other characters: Arkady and Natalya’s 10-year-old son, Kolya, who adores Belyaev; Anna, Arkady’s mother; Lizaveta, Anna’s companion; Schaaf the German tutor; Bolshintsove, an elderly rich neighbour and the suitor of Vera; Matvey, a servant who loves Katya; and, last but not least, Shpigelsky, the local doctor (Gatiss), who is incompetent but charming. You can easily see why the original version of the play is a baggy masterpiece. Marber’s version is fast on its feet – lasting about 135 minutes – and its action unfolds with a kind of joyous rapidity.

The keynote of the writing is a stress on the comic absurdity of human endeavour, and an ironically cool detachment from the characters. Unlike Chekhov, who is the master of the subtext, Marber here spells out most of the conflicts, dotting i-s and crossing t-s, giving the characters a fair bit of self-awareness and a handful of revealingly self-reflexive speeches. This has the advantage of clarity, if not subtlety. The jokes are good, and they come thick and quick. Typically, the doctor complains plaintively: “How am I to survive if people simply get better?”

The chaos caused by amorous desire, even in an age of restraint, is well presented. Natalya, who understands how her relationship with her father has damaged her psyche, falls passionately in love with an entirely unsuitable man who is half her age. Meanwhile, her long-standing love, Rakitin (Simm), is stuck in an unending and unsatisfying relationship with her, to the frustration of both. By contrast, the young love expressed in different ways by Vera, Matvey and Belyaev is like a flame that flares up quickly, only to be snuffed out almost immediately. Most comically, the scene in which the doctor proposes marriage to Lizaveta is a comic masterclass, played brilliantly by Gatiss and Debra Gillett.

Other themes include the pre-Chekhovian feeling that the gentry is wasting their time in despair, along with intimations of violent social and political change. Somewhere on the horizon a revolution is gathering strength. At the same time, what Karl Marx called the “idiocy of rural life” is pictured in a comic register, symbolised by Natalya’s statement that “It is wrong to jump on a cow”. Various shades of despair and disappointment afflict many of the characters, and leave a rather sad aftertaste. But although there is plenty to enjoy here, I did feel that a complete rewrite that reimagined the story for our contemporary world would have been more interesting. This is Turgenev lite.

Marber directs in a competent, but rather uninspiring way. Amanda Drew is better at conveying the self-loathing Natalya’s fragility than her charisma, but maybe her ordinariness is precisely the point in this version. As ever, Gatiss is a joy to watch, especially when playing drunk, and both Simm and John Light (Arkady) are suitably restrained and, when neeeded, passionate. Lily Sacofsky’s Vera and Gawn Grainger’s Schaaf (pictured above) work well in support. A cluster of visual jokes – about raspberries, kites and bad backs – help the fun along, but this is an evening that is never more than the sum of its parts.

• Three Days in the Country at the National Theatre until 21 October