I do admire actors who take on a production requirement to occupy the stage well before the audience is seated. Romola Garai does this at the start of both halves of this taut version of Chekhov’s classic; and there is all the more impact on the audience when she does finally move.

Actually, she is remarkable in the production: she covers icy cold to near lust with consummate ease, and the subtle eyeing up of the officer Vershinin when he first appears is quality acting. Her Masha is at the heart of the play, and her emotions the spine.

And so the sisters sit miles from Moscow and pine and make do. Masha has been married to Fyodor for eight not entirely happy years; her younger sister Irina is footloose and not yet ruined by the absence of a lover; and Olga, though but 28, is the calming senior one, mostly unfazed but deeply caring. Clare Dunne is an exciting prospect as Irina (she only graduated from drama college last year) and Poppy Miller’s Olga is cleverly done.

The production values are present but spare, as Garai and Miller told me in an interview last week: the whole of the second half takes place on a wreck of a set which occupies – or rather doesn’t quite – the whole of the Playhouse stage. The depth of the space reflects the depth of the drama.

I was not, on the other hand, entirely convinced of the necessity for the odd (therefore why?) use of microphones and electric guitars.

There is no weak link in the cast. Some of them need time to grow on you, but they do. Jonathan Broadbent plays the piano expertly in interludes and as Tuzenbach is surprisingly effective – you can see why Irina might want to marry him. Paul Brennan as Masha’s husband is launched in comedic fashion, but is properly moving in the second half. John Lightbody has true stage presence as the officer who falls for Masha (and having scoured the programme twice, I cannot recall where I have seen him before: the voice is immediately recognisable).

There are a few seriously fine minutes when all three sisters are on stage in the second half – trying to cope with the fire which has hit the neighbourhood: three actresses at the top of their game. Apart from that fire, nothing actually happens in the play. Words, and pent-up emotions, are all and, very specifically, Garai, Miller and Dunne deliver very specially.

Oxford Playhouse until Saturday. Tel: 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).