THE comparisons between Alan Ayckbourn and Anton Chekhov have been made so often, it was surely only a matter of time before the Scarborough knight adapted one of the Russian’s dark dramas.

Prompted initially by a suggestion by York-raised director Matthew Warchus in 2008, Ayckbourn has brought an affectionate English slant to Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, relocating the tale of love, ennui and family friction to the Lake District in 1935, that lull in English history when there was too much time for thinking.

Directed in the round by Ayckbourn with trademark attention to detail – such as choreographed scene changes that draw rounds of applause – the domestic drama opens to the strains of Love Is The Sweetest Thing, when here, of course, love is anything but the sweetest thing.

“I’m the only living thing without a life. Isn’t that terrible?” says the enervated Marcus (Matthew Cottle), the re-named Vanya of the piece. “With a past that was entirely wasted and a present bordering on the ridiculous,” he judges himself.

He is right, of course. Marcus is 47, too articulate for his own sanity like Hamlet and stuck like Boxer in Orwell’s 1984 in the self-sacrificial drudge of running the family estate that had belonged to his late sister. Worse still, he is hopelessly in unrequited love with Helena (Frances Grey). He could be as much a feckless, inept male creation of Ayckbourn as of Chekhov, and Cottle’s performance of bewilderment at the world around him is a tragicomic gem.

Helena, meanwhile, is so bored, she can barely bring herself to walk round and round the table, pretty but pretty useless, and suddenly drawn to the conservation-fixated, drink-seeking Dr Charles Ash (Phil Cheadle), who has fared better at forest preservation than looking after himself.

For all his pontificating, Ash is an unthinking fellow, indifferent to the need for tender handling of the schoolgirl crush of Marcus’s niece Sonya (Amy Loughton), so sweet 16 and besotted. Loughton is new to Scarborough, another Ayckbourn discovery, and her face is a wonderfully expressive canvas throughout.

An old Ayckbourn favourite, Terence Booth, is in fine comedic form as the maddening, house-ruling Sir Cedric Savidge, the boringly loquacious professor whose self-pitying prattling, dyspeptic demeanour and insensitivity so irks Marcus.

Not to be overlooked, unlike his character, is the delightful cameo of another SJT stalwart, Richard Derrington, as the oft-ignored yet eternally charming chinless wonder Julian Touchweston-Smith, while Eileen Battye’s nanny Marie is consistently amusing as the only happy soul in this lake-land mire.

Dear Uncle is a slow-turning tragedy wrapped inside a taut, dark comedy of lost souls seemingly unable to break out of the chains of a stultifying life.

Through Ayckbourn’s sage gaze, it is the most painful, sad humour you will experience all year. Still Chekhov, but much more the English view on life’s lot.

Dear Uncle, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in rep on various dates until September 20. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com