Stage appearances by the great Sophie Okonedo must be treasured for their rarity and she is in fine form in Ivan Turgenev’s bittersweet 19th-century Russian comedy. Compared to her scorching Medea three years ago – where she was isolated on the exposing @sohoplace stage, circled by a prowling Ben Daniels – this is an intimate ensemble affair.

Her twinkly, impetuous, riven Natalya Petrovna is at the centre of the crushes and desires that afflict every stratum of the rural household of which she is mistress, but she doesn’t have to carry the show. Imperious but also girlish, this performance recalls the stage role that preceded Medea: Okonedo’s 2018 Cleopatra at the National that won her a Standard Best Actress Award.

Brian Friel’s 1992 translation now sounds a little quaint, particularly when Natalya and her chastely devoted lover Michel (Alistair Petrie) commune with their inner voices. Director Lyndsey Turner gives the play a slightly arch, performative spin, bordering on the farcical.

Designer Leslie Travers accentuates the staginess by periodically dropping a foliage-stuffed glass box onto his idyllic, grassy set, emphasising that the characters are trapped by their emotions. It’s great fun: sheer proximity to the actors at the Donmar makes it feel as if we’re spying on them from a thicket.

You can see here the template, of an adored woman stuck in a household governed by boredom and yearning, that Chekhov and also Gorky used to explore later stages of Russia’s march towards 20th-century upheaval. Natalya is stuck endlessly reading the same page of Tristram Shandy with the pained and worshipping Michel while her abstracted husband Arkady, Michel’s best friend, tinkers with machinery outside. Her mother-in-law, her snuff-snorting companion Lizaveta and a malapropising German houseguest Herr Schaaf bicker in the background.

Aleksey (Patrick Gibson), a galvanising student from the lower classes, has been hired to tutor Natalya’s son, but is clearly making more of an impression on her 17-year-old ward Vera (Rachelle Diedericks). But Dr Shpigelsky (Daniel Rigby), also from serf-level poverty, wants to see Vera married for advantage rather than for love – as Natalya was – to a stupid old neighbour, who will give Shpigelsky a carriage and horses if he seals the deal. The saucy servants are having a fraught romance of their own.

But Natalya, like Chekhov’s heroines, needs be loved by everyone, including Aleksey. It’s not much of a spoiler to say it ends, unhappily if not tragically ever after for everyone, except possibly Shpigelsky.

There are finely judged performances of burgeoning, youthful sensuality from Diedericks and Gibson here and a lovely study of on-the-make calculation from the comically gifted Rigby as the doctor, who stops just short of desperation. You sense Friel’s Irish ear for dialogue in the terrible jokes Shpigelsky tells to keep in favour. (“You winnow some, you lose-o some,” he quips when Arkady’s winnowing machine breaks down yet again.) Petrie is one of those actors whose mere presence on a cast list makes you relax and his Michel is a study of quiet, enthralled pain.

Some of the lesser characters are broadly drawn, by both the authors and the performers. Turgenev has a farceur’s fondness for having his characters caught in embarrassing situations – at least once, in Turner’s rendering, almost in flagrante. This scene, though, provides a masterclass in subtext as Aleksey professes himself smitten with Natalya’s “grace” and she repeats “but you leave tomorrow” in the mounting hope of being contradicted. The moment when he twitches her silk scarf from the column of her neck is charged with eroticism.

There’s a slight sense of debts being paid here: a feeling that Turgenev should not always be overshadowed by his successor and superior, Chekhov; that the massive contribution Brian Friel made to theatre in original plays and translations should be better acknowledged. There may also have been a calculation involved over what play and what role would tempt Okonedo back on stage. Never mind. The result is worth it.

To 3 Oct, donmarwarehouse.com