Lyric Theatre, Dublin Previews Feb 4-8 €16/€5 Opens Feb 9-Mar 11 7.45pm (Sat mat 2.30pm Sun mat 3.30pm) €5-€23.00 lyrictheatre.co.uk028-90381081

Brian Friel once wondered why he was so drawn towards Russian literature. “Maybe because the characters behave as if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever – even though they know in their hearts that their society is in meltdown.”

There were other reasons for resonances with sad Russians wasting prettily away around the samovar: “They seem to expect that their problems will disappear if they talk about them – endlessly.”

For Irish theatre the elegiac and slyly subversive Chekhov holds a kinship that is not quite paternal, but close enough: he is our Uncle Russia.

Friel's 1998 version of Uncle Vanyamay open with "a decaying Russian estate", but his interest in Ivan Petrovich Voinitsky brings him much closer to home. Saddled with the thankless task of running his brother- in-law's estate, all the while pining – fruitlessly – for the professor's second wife Elena, Vanya's is a life half-lived, his dreams endlessly deferred.

In the wrong hands it’s a part that can seem merely pathetic (Chekhov’s humour is dependably off-beam), but the coup of Mick Gordan’s production, directing the new Lyric Theatre’s first Friel play, is to cast Conleth Hill (pictured), the international authority in playing amiable eccentrics.

Heading an all-Irish cast through these Hiberno-Russian tensions, Hill’s job is to find the grim good humour of keeping it all in the family.

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