REVIEW: Uncle Vanya, Minerva Theatre, Chichester, until May 5.

In 1962 Uncle Vanya was apparently the moment it was suddenly clear to everyone that Chichester's brand-new Festival Theatre had a sparkling future ahead of it.

By that reckoning, after tonight’s revival 50 years later, the CFT is looking odds on to reach its century.

Bringing back Vanya to launch the CFT’s 50th anniversary season was always going to be a popular choice, a great way of acknowledging the theatre’s glorious past.

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But Jeremy Herrin’s excellent production is equally a celebration of the theatre’s wonderfully-buoyant present.

It has to be stressed, though, that this is a production which demands patience.

There are moments in the first half when you wonder whether depicting a bunch of bored and frustrated people might not actually be a little boring and frustrating in itself; there are times when you might just find yourself wishing for a theatrical fast-forward button.

But stick with it, and your little dip into the ennui of Chekhov’s world proves the perfect investment for a second half which kicks off tremendously.

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Central to it all is Roger Allam as a superlative Vanya, bitter, bitchy, scornful and spiteful, contemptuous of the professor and vainly in love with the professor’s wife. And yet the worst is yet to come: the professor’s announcement that he intends to sell the estate.

Which is the moment all hell - insofar as Vanya can summon it - breaks loose. Of course, it all turns out to be a storm in a samovar, but that’s presumably Chekhov’s point when life resumes its course as if nothing had happened.

The cast’s - and director Herrin’s brilliance - is in finding the comedy in it all, comedy shattered the next moment by Vanya’s poignant “I haven’t lived”, the tragedy of the man waking to the fact that he’s wasted his life - a tragedy all the more poignant for the fact that his only option is to carry on.

In support, Timothy West is excellent as the professor, a man happy to waste everyone else’s life in the vain pursuit of his empty studies. West’s comic timing is perfect, not least in the way he never manages to remember poor Telegin’s name (Anthony O’Donnell).

What a hopeless bunch. And how brilliantly Herrin’s cast turns their - and our - boredom into an evening fit for this very special anniversary year.

Phil Hewitt