Suspense: the agonising, exquisite drawing-out of the wait for something inevitable to happen. It is the trademark of Alfred Hitchcock, and diametrically opposite to that of Anton Chekhov, which is the stately drawing-out of the wait for something that was never going to happen anyway. Instead of the terror and anticipation of a Hitchcock, Chekhov deals in ennui and low-to-moderate despair.

His genius lies in making compelling human dramas out of such territory. Even as we see how pointless his characters’ existences are – even as, quite often, they debate it themselves – we identify and empathise with their banal desires, their petty avoidances. This is due in no small part to sensitive direction which can let us see behind characters’ words and conduct, to peer as it were round the edges of what they say. In Konstantin Stanislavski he had a director whose style complemented his own. Complementarity is the key, not synchronisation: if writing and staging are in unison, we lose the harmony.

That, I fear, is the case with the current version of Uncle Vanya at Hampstead. The writer of this new adaptation strikes a deliciously dyspeptic tone as the title character grouses about all the years he has spent, unappreciated and unloved, managing his brother-in-law’s country estate and his friend and rival, the idealistic but lackadaisical doctor Astrov, laments how little fulfilment he can find whilst never going anywhere to seek it. Alan Cox’s natural temperament is towards the wry and sardonic, and watching him deliver Vanya’s serial gobbets of exhausted bile is like watching an archer send a second arrow straight into the bullseye to split the shaft of the first one. Similarly, the director has a long and honourable record as regards precision of both mood and pace. But here he’s directing in unison with the adaptation, not offering as it were a harmony line that runs alongside the words and offers us a richer experience. And what makes it awkward is that director and adapter are the same man, Terry Johnson.

It’s not that Johnson the director is giving Johnson the adapter an easy time: quite the reverse, he shows great deliberation in matching things up, which isn’t easy when what you’re matching are understatement and unhurriedness rather than explicitness and verve. For instance, the second act of Vanya, set in the hour after midnight when nothing is happening in the house but everyone is still awake, is almost Beckettian in its eventlessness. Johnson the adapter captures it perfectly, and Johnson the director stages it carefully with the listless, almost dreary pace at which all that’s not happening doesn’t. Consequently, the sense of drama is attenuated. There should be an emotional charge as Yeliena and Sonia, the female members of the play’s unrequited-love knot, find friendship, but both Abbey Lee and Alice Bailey Johnson are in late-night winding-down mode.

Lee gets to parody herself in the next act, striking a succession of languid poses on a chaise longue before the play exhibits the nearest it gets to an incident of some kind. As with Three Sisters, the heartbreak of the final act is that it shows a return to square one, but Johnson (with both his hats on) is simply too good at capturing this emptiness. I love him and Cox quite as much as I do Chekhov, and I admire this production immensely, but I simply can’t shake the conviction that it is a victim of its own success. Although almost every isolated moment seems right, the sum of the parts slips out of kilter and feels – odd though it is to use the word about Chekhov – underpowered.

Written for the Financial Times.