The Vakhtangov Academic State Theatre from Moscow has made two previous visits to Britain, staging Uncle Vanya and Eugene Onegin. Their latest visit is radically different. Smile Upon Us, Lord is adapted from the novels of the Grigory Kanovich and is set in his culture, Lithuanian Judaism. It tells of stonecutter Efraim (actors alternate in the two lead roles during this London run) who leaves his shtetl with some friends to journey to the capital Vilnius, where his son is on trial for a political assassination attempt. On the way, the villagers encounter an assortment of outré characters and do a lot of musing on life, death and associated matters.

It’s part-Waiting For Godot, part-road trip movie and part-the kind of spectacle – visually striking with huge, near-clowning performances, but a sense of earnest thematic undercurrents opaque to western sensibilities – one associates with Polish theatre of the late Soviet era. Well, Lithuania is next door to Poland, and director Rimas Tuminas not only began his career in Lithuania but began his involvement with staging Kanovich’s novels when he ran the National Theatre in Vilnius. The characters engage in a fair bit of reflection upon nationality, between Jewishness and Lithuanianness; add a third dimension of Russianness, and the relationship not only between the material, director and theatre but also between those two republics (which, as Viv Groskop laconically remarked in her article on Russian theatre last week, is “not uncomplicated”), and I suspect that this aspect of the production would fly over the head of any Briton without a relevant postgraduate qualification.

What remains, fortunately, is staged by Tuminas as being of universal application. We are all trying to find our way through a world which is at best uncaring, at worst actively hostile towards little us. If that sounds almost archetypally Russian, the staging allows for humour ranging from the poker-faced sardonic to the overtly surreal. On press night, a plastic carrier bag blew onstage and Viktor Sukhorukov kicked, blew and generally propelled it across the stage without any sense of incongruity. One of the floral bouquets at curtain-call was presented to Yulia Rutberg, who plays Efraim’s cherished she-goat. In other words, at three hours it’s long and serious, but not grim.

Written for the Financial Times.