Burnt by the Sun, by contrast, is very moving and visually beautiful, despite its underlying brutality. Adapted from a successful Russian film of 1994, it is set in the Soviet Union in 1936, during the Stalinist terror. That is hardly apparent at first: the play opens upon a nest of gentlefolk in a timeless Chekhovian wooden dacha surrounded by predictable birch trees and birdsong and artfully flooded by the light of nostalgia. Lighting directors must have filters actually labelled "nostalgia". However, it gradually emerges that nothing is what it seems.

The dacha has been confiscated by the state and the twittering gentlefolk, in mourning for what's gone with the wind of revolution, stay there only at the whim of the powerful working-class Soviet general who has married their beautiful Maroussia. A long-lost lover of hers, a man of her own class, mysteriously reappears and surprising betrayals and revelations hurry upon each other to a terrible ending.

There's something old-fashioned and conventionally stagey about this production, almost as if it were a Chekhov play that, however touching, might seem rather remote from us. But it isn't. The Russian government seems now to be trying to rehabilitate Stalin and to suppress evidence against him, as the historian Orlando Figes has just discovered, so this subtle and complex play, despite its period flavour, has all the more resonance. Howard Davies's production is strikingly coherent and disciplined in every aspect - in its acting, its dazzling set and its movement: there's a brilliant dance competition between the lover and the general.