THEATRE / Go west, Vanya: August - Theatr Clwyd, Mold

Wales has another candidate for the cruellest month, or at least so Julian Mitchell's new adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya suggests. Acknowledging a cue from Thomas Kilroy's Irish setting of The Seagull, Mitchell has transposed Vanya for Anthony Hopkins into Ieuan, and his world into that of the landed gentry of 1890s Caernarvonshire. The brief blaze of the Welsh summer heats and illuminates the characters' lives with hope of transfiguration before the rain resumes its sifting fall past the window.

But it is not only emblematically that Mitchell's setting and Hopkins' production works. The social placing is informatively exact. The maids are addressed in Welsh, and Welsh is also the language of intimacy, especially between Sian and the old family nanny Gwenny. Ieuan and the local doctor, Michael Lloyd (Gawn Grainger), both fixed and frustrated here, are not heard to speak Welsh but retain their accent, whereas the family success, the London professor Alexander, has lost it entirely in favour of a metropolitan affectation neatly evoked by Leslie Phillips. Furthest removed, and so most exotic, is Alexander's young wife, Helen, whom Mitchell has made American.

These different veins carry the tensions within the family perfectly, and, especially in that middle range inhabited by Ieuan and Lloyd, the self-hatred inherent in their despising of Wales. True, the setting is occasionally exploited for cheap laughs as when Alexander exclaims - to the relish of the Mold audience - 'I hate Wales]' as Ieuan pursues him with a gun.

This last is the most damaging result of Hopkins' decision in this, his directorial debut, to tip the play's tone firmly towards the comic. Of course Ieuan's incongruous assault does border on farce, but here the pathos is lost.

But the cause of my disappointment here lies further back in Hopkins' conception of the role. As satirist, especially in the first act, he is superb. Swivelling in his chair like some benign reptile as he affects amused bewilderment at the self-delusions surrounding him, he is wonderfully funny. But his scepticism seems ingrained rather than the product of recent exhaustion and disillusion. So powerfully caustic is he, it is not credible that he could have been Sian's dogged companion in drudgery all these years.

A fine conception of Chekhov's play is thus only half- realised. The summer flare is not intense enough in Helen, where Lisa Orgolini is poignantly beautiful but not desperate enough, and where both Ieuan's and Lloyd's pursuit of her is more like harassment than devotion. But at the close, as the hillside darkens, all the grave weight of cancellation seems to settle on Hopkins' broad, defeated shoulders.

'August', Theatr Clwyd, Mold (0352 755114) to 19 Nov; New Theatre, Cardiff (0222 394844) 22-26 Nov