National Theatre Wales, best known for Michael Sheen's The Passion in Port Talbot last Easter, likes to take imaginative leaps and has drawn one of the UK's top playwrights to his home city.

Bringing director Peter Gill back to Cardiff to stage his 1960s play pays off refreshingly.

Gill draws on Russian writer Chekhov's stories of life in a provincial backwater. Is he also drawing parallels with the Cardiff of his youth? Surely, he is. And the visible austerity on view also seems to chime with the age.

Starchy, stiff-backed society is in chaos and polluted by class hatred. The portrayal of Chekhov's Russia is uncanny.

Having lived in that neck of the woods, Chekhov's melancholy mood of 1890s Russia has in no way changed for the masses.

Corruption is rife, drunkenness, duplicity and despair are still scourges of society - there's a sense that there's a bottomless void of unending pain.

It's all vividly and cannily re-created by an excellent cast who give us prim, stuffed-shirt 'pillars' of society, dreamers and kooky crackpots in glorious abundance.

So while a melancholy mood is created, A Provincial Life casts a magical, fascinating spell. There's vroom in the gloom.

Gill concludes that even when life appears to be meaningless, small, insignificant acts do make a difference.

So, it seems, if you live in Dullsville, whether it's Russia or the Rhondda, there's always hope.

A Provincial Life is at the Sherman until Saturday, March 17.