Big budget, huge stage, massive temptation. The Lyttelton is a notorious elephant-trap for designers who feel obliged to fill every inch of space with effortful proof of their brilliance. Frankie Bradshaw, designer of Dear Octopus, avoids these snares and instead creates a modest playing area, smaller than the actual stage, which is bookended by a doorway on one side and a fireplace on the other. These physical boundaries draw the actors towards the middle of the stage with a staircase overhead to complete the frame. Brilliant stuff. Perfectly simple, too.

Any director planning to work at the Lyttelton should see Emily Burns’s fabulous production. So should everyone else. This is a slow-burning family drama that examines the romantic tensions and ancient grudges simmering within an upper-class English clan on the eve of the second world war. It’s not as intense, poetic and wide-ranging as Chekhov but it’s close. Critics who complain about a lack of narrative complexity are overlooking the fact that not every internal conflict translates into action. Sometimes a character endures in silence for decades on end and nothing else happens.

The show stars Lindsay Duncan as Dora, a matriarch in her early seventies, whose beauty requires no external ornament. Her lifelong rival, Belle, also in her seventies, prefers cosmetic intervention and this prompts Dora to remark that Belle’s face is unsafe ‘to be taken out in the rain’. Belle replies by praising Dora’s ‘trust in nature’ which proves that Dora must be ‘genuinely loved’. This subtle catfight continues throughout the play and the malice of the ladies’ backchat is disguised by affection and diplomacy. Every putdown is couched as a compliment, every snarky footnote offered as friendly advice. Mean Girls has nothing on this script by Dodie Smith, whose best-known fictional character, Cruella de Vil, appeared in her 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

At the heart of the play lies a secret romance between the unmarried Nicholas and a lovelorn servant, Fenny, who has few options in life other than a career as a typist or marriage to a shifty chicken farmer. But Fenny is loathed by a frumpy rival who spreads vicious gossip about her among Nicholas’s three sisters. Meanwhile, the family rebel, Cynthia, has returned from Paris after a romance with a married man. This breaches the moral code of the family and Cynthia faces a showdown with Dora, who may reject her permanently.

If you can sit through this harrowing encounter without a tear moistening your eye, you’re probably a robot. The play culminates with an equally fraught scene in which Nicholas makes a botched attempt to win Fenny’s heart with a wedding ring. This show is a marvel. Brilliant performances all round. Dramatically riveting. Visually superb. And it establishes beyond doubt that a season of plays by Smith is needed.

The Addams Family are a prototype of the Simpsons. They appear to mock and subvert middle-class values while obliquely reinforcing them. Every member of the clan has a penchant for sadism and schoolboy humour. They dress up as goths or sex slaves and they inflict monstrous cruelties on those around them. The daughter, Wednesday, uses a bow and arrow to hunt game and she presents dying animals for her mother to skin and cook. As an amusement, she straps her brother to a torture-rack or she nails his tongue to the garage floor – but he claims to enjoy these cruelties.

Apart from their baroque tastes, the family are perfectly conventional and the parents’ marriage is founded on mutual trust and respect. Morticia expects nothing but obedience from her children – and she gets it. When Wednesday courts a new boyfriend, Lucas, the parents go to enormous lengths to welcome him, even though he’s a ‘square’ from Ohio. That’s the plot of this undemanding musical. Fun for the kids. Bit of a yawn for the parents.

The highlight of the first act is delivered by Kara Lane, as Lucas’s mum, who breaks free of her marital straitjacket and belts out a thrilling anthem to the unspoken sufferings of women. Not only is Lane a fabulous singer, but she also looks great leaping around the stage with a carving knife clutched in her fist. Not all the cast in Matthew White’s production are as funny as they think they are. And the soundtrack tries to compensate with superfluous effects. Botox, alas, has impeded the reaction times of some of the more mature actresses.

On the plus side, Ramin Karimloo fizzes and sparkles as the swashbuckling Gomez. Lesley Joseph, as Grandma, gets big laughs from her rather meagre part. Her grumbling tummy and her squelchy incontinence will delight anyone aged ten or under. ‘When I fart,’ she says during a formal dinner, ‘it’s enough to start the windmills on an old Dutch painting.’