Kristin's rapturous debut

I cannot think of any film star who has made a more riveting debut on the London stage than Kristin Scott Thomas. Her remarkable performance as Masha, whose adulterous love for another woman's husband is the making and breaking of her, charges Michael Blakemore's sometimes thinblooded production of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters with a quiet, rapturous intensity.

Miss Scott Thomas proves herself that rarest thing - a cinema star whose charisma increases rather than fades on stage. I have not seen a more dramatic or expressive pair of eyes at work in any playhouse. And even, or rather especially when silent, she compels attention without doing anything to invite it.

There this sexy Masha sits squeezed into a funereal black dress when the play opens in the drawing room of the Prozorov's home, miles from the Moscow to which all three sisters long to go. You can deduce from this Masha's eloquent body language that she seethes with boredom, desire and discontent.

Her marriage to James Fleet's infantile bore of a husband has gone flat as a burst balloon. And on the appearance of Robert Bathurst's Vershinin, the new battery commander, her luminous eyes fix upon him as if encountering a welcome ghost. From this smitten though undeclared moment Miss Scott Thomas's cool, curt Masha continues to beam the force of her personality upon him. A smile plays upon her face. She is transformed by love.

Thanks, principally to Miss Thomas, Blakemore's production catches much of Chekhov's rueful, bitter-sweet comedy and its final anguished sense of loss. And Christopher Hampton's smooth translation helps. But the production's pre-revolutionary gentry, beset by escapist longings for new life and love, succumb to misplaced listlessness.

There are the play's two intruders: Colonel Vershinin, twice unhappily married but still a chronic optimist, convinced a better future awaits Russia and Natasha, who marries the sisters' brother, Andrei, and drives the women from their rooms and the house itself. Yet Bathurst's dreary, ponderous Vershinin has all the radical fire of a squib and Susannah Wise's Natasha lacks a fierce, cutting edge.

All the characters are stranded in a life-limbo, but ought to have the vitality of their prejudices and should change - for the worse. Not all do.

Douglas Hodge is marvellous as Andrei, the brother who craves academic life and settles for cuckoldom and power on the local council. His face, voice and manner register the hard lines of anger and disappointment. And David Burke's old doctor is impressively, increasingly fired by alcohol and detachment.

Eric Sykes's Ferapoint potters around in an amusing haze of deafness. But neither Kate Burton's mature, winsome Olga nor Madeleine Worrall, who gives the youngest sister Irina a speech impediment, achieve emotional fire-power.

The staging is weirdly dysfunctional. Designer Robin Don needlessly cramps the action and actors into a tiny drawing room. Instead of opening up the stage so there is room for the ballroom lunch-party, he cuts off the back space with a sinister wall, composed of wire-like squares. A wooden proscenium frame, with huge IKEA-like recesses and cupboards, looks far too modern, as does the contemporarylooking garden finale. But Miss Scott Thomas rises well above the scenery with her exquisite Masha.