Three Sisters, Playhouse, London

A persuasive sister act

It's sobering to think that 14 years have passed since Michael Blakemore's landmark production of Uncle Vanya in the West End with Michael Gambon and Greta Scacchi. In the meantime, he has stayed on Chekhov's case with Country Life, a movie that took Vanya and made something more robustly funny out of it by translating the proceedings to an Australian sheep farm. These facts from the Blakemore CV would, in an ideal world, be the drum roll to a great paean of praise for his return to the West End with a powerfully cast Three Sisters. But I'm afraid that, even with some superb performances, the production is a bit of a let-down.

When all its elements come together, Three Sisters strikes me as the greatest play ever written. Oddly, I still felt that here, though that was as much because of the instructive miscalculations as thanks to the strengths. But compliments first. The sisters – Olga (a worn and winning Kate Burton), Masha (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Irina (Madeleine Worrall) – are strongly realised as individuals and interact persuasively as siblings. I particularly admired the piercing way that Worrall's Irina showed a young woman who still felt it was her duty to charm and reassure even when crying-jag despair was destroying her ingénue demeanour. As Andrei (Douglas Hodge), their failure of a brother, subsides into a throttled, paunchy self-justification that's at once laughable and harrowing, this would-be professor keeps reminding people that he's "a member of the board of the local authority". Hodge lets you see that this is a demand for respect from a man whose respect for himself has been shot to pieces.

With that formidably lovely brow of hers and that poised fire-and-ice quality, Scott Thomas is a potentially definitive Masha. What stops her from being so brings us to the production's liabilities. The weakest link is Blakemore's casting of Vershinin, the "lovesick major", the crucial catalytic character in the piece. Just how brilliantly Chekhov deploys him had never hit me as forcibly before watching Robert Bathurst having a dreadful time with the part. Bathurst is a delightful comic actor of great charm and resource. But there are more volatile Slavic mood-swings in an edition of Yes, Minister than here. There's no erotic charge whatsoever in his relationship with Masha, with the result that the final scene fails to twist your heart to the requisite degree. There have been productions that suggested that all the sisters were smitten by this soldier. But the leeway that Chekhov allows a director by leaving things unsaid between the lines is not explored very interestingly here.

There is admirable work from Tobias Menzies, who poignantly brings out that loveability in Tusenbach which Irina just can't latch on to, and from David Burke, who, in the very fine drunk scene, lets Chebutykin's self-disgust suddenly razor its way through the character's hide of cynicism. Instead of remaining in the usual iconic sisterly embrace at the end, the three don coats and scarves and move, in their separate ways, into the future. It's a coolly realistic final touch in a production that needs more fire.

To 18 May (020-7839 4401)