(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

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ADAM MARS-JONES:
It was incredibly good. I object to the fact it's described as Brian Friel's play, because it seems very much the Uncle Vanya we have seen and enjoyed. But the futility guilt and the futility counterpoint has rarely been done so well. It's incredibly well cast but nobody gets in anybody else's light. If everybody did things like this, nobody would have any free evenings.

LAWSON:
There have always been connections with Hamlet, but they bring that out very strongly. You get erotic jealousy and desperate act of revenge, and those parallels come through strongly.

NATASHA WALTER:
It's an extraordinary performance by Simon Russell Beale. The amazing thing about the way this is directed is that he gets past that comic knowingness that a lot of English staid acting brings to writers like Chekhov. There is innocence and liveliness about the way they inhabit their roles. They inhabit them physically so brilliantly. Simon Russell Beale as Uncle Vanya has this constant sense of physical embarrassment. He is weighed down by his body. That's rare to see on the stage, but always with fluttering fingers and sputtering voice. He is trying to rise above his fat, unwieldy body. In that you get a sense of his tragedy and the sympathy. The first entrance of Yelena, with this languoros beauty. The contrast between the two, you see the tragedy of the play laid out in front of you. It is extraordinary what he has managed to do with the actors here.

MARK KERMODE:
I liked it very much. Mendes has one foot in theatre and one in cinema. The thing this reminded me of most in terms of the small tragedies, not of kings and queens but of little people doing all right but everything going miserably wrong. It reminded me of Mike Leigh. People always talked of Leigh as being slightly Chekhovian and I never got that. Watching this and the way it played out, that's how it played to me. What�s clever is they do that but within the circumstance of it being a bunch of people surrounded by a tremendous amount of wheat wondering whether they will survive the next winter. I thought it was beautifully put together, nicely pitched. Also, it was funnier than I thought.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.