Summer in December

Distilled from a sprawling posthumously discovered early manuscript of Anton Chekhov, Wild Honey is the tale of provincial Don Juan and school teacher Platonov and the trail he blazes at the centre of many women's affection, chiefly among them his devoted wife. When the two move into his in-laws' country house for the summer, emotions and desires intensify rapidly in the growing heat.

First staged in 1984, it Wild Honey has been described as a sex-comedy with existential woes, as Platonov navigates passions, misunderstandings, legal action and the odd murder plot or two in his quest to regain control over himself. Though the source material represents an embryonic Chekhov, there is a reconisable brilliance in this portrait of a vanishing world.