The White Guard is not really a great play either, perhaps because it was originally written as a novel and then dramatised under almost impossible conditions. Although the novel was a celebration of a White Russian intellectual family, much like Bulgakov's own, who were opposed to the revolution, it was none the less dramatised for the post-revolutionary Moscow Art Theatre under the harsh eyes of the Soviet censors. Stalin — unaccountably — loved it and saw it at least 20 times. The play ran for nearly 1,000 performances, perhaps because so many Russians responded to its elegiac sense of the loss inflicted upon people like themselves. 

What makes it a great piece of theatre is Howard Davies's outstanding production at the Lyttelton — the third in his Russian trilogy. Bunny Christie's sets are hugely impressive; the curtain rises on the Turbin family's vast family living room in a Kiev apartment, with immense windows looking down on to a chaos we never see but constantly hear, of shouting, gunshots and terrifying explosions. The sound designer, Terry King, has contributed greatly to the atmosphere throughout. It is the winter of 1918: Kiev is in the hands of a puppet German governor and is being fought over by pro-Tsarist White Russians (such as the Turbins), Ukrainian nationalists and the approaching Red Army. Confronted with terror and loss, the Turbins and their hangers-on and fellow soldiers nonetheless talk and joke together in the refuge of the apartment. They eat, sing, quarrel and get drunk with Russian volatility, careering from pathos to bathos, from tragedy to sentimentality, from heartbreak to comedy. 

Such rapid Chekhovian shifts of mood and meaning are very difficult to achieve, and Bulgakov is not Chekhov (I am convinced the problem lies with the script rather than the accomplished cast). There are moments of inconsistency and imbalance throughout: the heroine's cowardly husband is a stereotypical upper class prat, while she is too human to be associated with such a two-dimensional joke. Her louche admirer, by contrast, combines absurdity with real feeling. It's as if Bulgakov cannot consistently control mood and tone, a weakness that is even more obvious in his famous novel The Master and Margarita. Still, this is a powerful production.

The best of these plays is Tennessee Williams's brilliantly funny Spring Storm, which I had never seen or read. It was forgotten, unpublished until 1996, rarely performed and had never been shown outside the US until the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton produced it last year, in tandem with Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon. Both were directed by Laurie Sansom. The productions were so outstanding that Nicholas Hytner of the National Theatre brought plays and company to the Cottesloe in a triumph for regional theatre.

Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1937,  Spring Storm is a tragedy of sexual longing and a comedy of the shabby-genteel manners of the decaying South. Heavenly Critchfield, a highly-sexed beauty from a fading family, hesitates between two men — one of them elementally atractive in the mould of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and the other an appealing and socially desirable rich man.

All the concerns of Williams's later plays are developed here, with such elegance and control that it is hard to believe that this first play was dismissed as worthless by his writing tutor. It is brilliantly funny, witty, accomplished and beautifully directed: of all these productions, Spring Storm  is the one not to miss.