Working from Laurence Senelick’s 2010 translation, this staging of Chekhov’s masterpiece is something of a rarity: a Three Sisters set firmly in its pre-Revolutionary place and period, and played with an almost complete cast.

Director Clara Voda creates a pressure cooker of feeling and frustration in a confined, furniture-packed space (designed by Ella Wilkinson). The energy is febrile at times, with characters talking over and under one another. They fail to listen when they should and frequently blunder into moments of crucial importance to others. The men are uniformly lacking in emotional intelligence and tact.

The sisters are vividly played. Madeline Li is Masha, trapped in marriage to a man who has revealed himself to be a dullard. Olga (Teodora Matović) frets over her lost youth and looming promotion to school headmistress. Tessa Olsson is perhaps the most striking as Irina, whose yearning for a more fulfilling life in Moscow leaves her pale, sickly and forever stretching toward a light source she cannot reach, like an etiolated plant. Hers is the plight that touches us most completely.

Three Sisters: Teodora Matović, Tessa Olsson and Madeline Li. Photo © Robert Miniter

Emma Wright is a powerful, complex presence as the emerging domestic tyrant Natasha, wife of Andrey (well played by Matthew Alexander, who seems to grow more corpulent and intellectually docile as time passes). Alfred Kouris is suitably dashing and melancholic as battery commander Vershinin, though perhaps lacking the mid-life gravitas that comes with age.

Toby Carey is a sweetly incompetent Baron Tuzenbach; Faisal Hamza is schoolmaster Kulygin, forever saying the wrong thing too loudly. Ren Watson is the dissolute doctor Chebutykin; Lập Nguyễn the square-peg Solyony; and the mononymic Cym the beloved, hard-of-hearing nanny Anfisa.

There are times when the crosstalk muddies potentially moving moments, but Voda’s staging compensates with urgency and emotional force – a turbid, fast-flowing river full of eddies and upwellings. This is a Three Sisters that reminds us how modern, and how how merciless, Chekhov can be.

Three Sisters plays at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Woolloomooloo, until 9 May.