Silences that speak

It is now commonplace to note that the Eskimos have at least seven different words for snow - but far less normal to encounter a production with at least seven different types of silence.

Katie Mitchell's daringly paced, elegiac version of Three Sisters excavates every nuance from Chekhov's text for a meditation on time worthy of this drama, written in the decade that Einstein first developed his relativity theory.

After a slightly faltering opening, where it was necessary to strain even from row F to hear certain words, Mitchell sends the first frisson down the spine with a distinctly supernatural moment when the room darkens, a vase smashes, and curtains blow wildly in the breeze. Lorraine Ashbourne's wiry and world-weary Olga is remembering when the sisters' father died, and suddenly the past invades the present as his memory is felt as strongly as any evocations of Hamlet's father's ghost.

For the first time the characters' collective emotion creates a silence where time seems to slow down - in huge contrast to the convivial jokey atmosphere where Fedotik sneakily takes a voyeuristic photo of Andrey kissing his disastrous bride-to-be, Natasha, or where Masha's husband Kulygin (a delightfully stilted Angus Wright) and her lover, Vershinin, stagger in wearing inappropriate antlers. Such moments of companionable comedy frequently lift the tone of this three and a half hour evening, allowing it to glitter with irony and mischief, even though each character's loneliness ultimately comes through as clearly as the call of a seagull.

While Kristin Scott Thomas's performance dominated Michael Blakemore's production of Three Sisters in the West End this April, the sense of tightknitted yet conflicted love between the National's three sisters is strident in an evening where Olga is seen almost kissing Masha's cuckolded husband with a mixture of compassion and desire, and the youngest, Irina, is treated protectively as a virginal doll.

Against Vicki Mortimer's vast set, which divides the stage in two so that, for instance, events in the high-ceilinged dining room can clearly be seen from the drawing room, Anna Maxwell Martin's Irina gradually grows from naif to firm-jawed pragmatist, while Eve Best's Masha suppurates with guilt and black-edged frustration.

Mitchell's poignant pacing makes hours feel like spellbinding years. How appropriate that the art-form itself perfectly demonstrates the illusion of time.

Until 4 October. Box office: 020 7452 3000.

Three Sisters