"Oh bloody hell! Another night of unending boredom." The speaker is not some tired critic entering the Whitehall for his umpteenth Three Sisters, but Masha in Samuel Adamson's new version. There is little danger of boredom, however, in Dominic Dromgoole's volatile and youthful, if visually awkward, Oxford Stage Company production.

I start with Adamson's adaptation because I believe it is too self-consciously brutal. I know Masha falls for the battery commander but that is no reason for her to swear like a trouper, "to buggery with this" being a typical protestation against her sister-in-law, Natasha. The problem is that this nullifies the family objection to Natasha on the snobbish grounds of vulgarity: here, Masha is far worse. And, while I'm cataloguing my complaints, Ti Green's clumsy set has little sense of place. It seems absurd that Jonny Phillips's Vershinin should appear with lank, shoulder-length hair and unpressed trousers. He looks less like a lieutenant-colonel than a louche roadie for a Russian rock group.

However, the prime virtue of this production is that it brings out the youthfulness of Chekhov's sisters, which makes the mockery of their hopes and desires all the more intense.

Claudie Blakley excellently plays the married Masha with the jaunty asperity of one whose hopes have already been tarnished. "Life's lousy, booze will make it rosy," is her working philosophy. Kelly Reilly's Irina makes a bigger journey from bouncy optimist to working drudge who, I suddenly realised, sends the Baron to his death by confession of her inability to love. And Claire Rushbrook's Olga is still young enough to feel crushed by premature responsibility and by her own apprehensions about sex.

Sex, in fact, features unusually strongly in Dromgoole's production: Irina romanticises it, Masha enjoys it illicitly and Olga shuts her eyes to it. You feel that part of their objection to Indira Varma's voluptuous Natasha, who nips upstairs for a passionate quickie with Andrei in the first act, is that she goes on to reconcile motherhood with adultery. On the other side of the coin, the pangs of cuckoldry are beautifully brought out by Paul Ritter as Masha's schoolmaster husband - not some Methuselah-like bore but a youngish man clearly desolated by his wife's infidelity. Even the taunting by Bohdan Poraj's sinister Solyony of Tom Smith's Baron is suggestive less of jealousy over Irina than of ungratified homosexual desire.

I've seen many productions that have come closer to the symphonic realism of Chekhov's play. But, if in the final act I felt that authentic Chekhovian thrill, I suspect it arose from the sensation of seeing young people realise that hope was not merely deferred but eternally shelved and that there was as much chance of Moscow being reached as of Godot ever turning up.