The revolution may have overtaken provincial Russia, but it never reached Chislehurst

It was a balmy night in Islington, and so the audience for David Hare's version of Maxim Gorky's Enemies was standing outside the Almeida Theatre during the interval. "Well, it's a period piece," I overheard a man say. "Just like the National's Voysey Inheritance."

Absolutely. The similarities between the two plays are remarkable. They were written at almost exactly the same moment at the turn of the 20th century. Granville Barker's comedy of the English middle classes was first produced in 1906, Gorky's tragedy of the Russian middle classes in 1907.

Both are largely set around a richly laid dining table in a wealthy domestic environment. Gorky's steaming samovar provides endless glasses of tea for angst-ridden, linen-suited men in a nameless Russian town, while Granville Barker's ladies in long dresses cavil and moan around the fruit bowls on a mahogany table in Chislehurst.

Indeed, the women in these two plays wear exactly the same fashions (tight waists, leg-of-mutton sleeves, fringed skirts), and you could probably swap the grumpy maidservants, caustic old gentlemen and dashing youths of the one for the other without missing much of a beat. As David Hare notes in the programme, Enemies is about a "helpless bourgeoisie"; he could have said much the same about the Voyseys.

The plays are positioned in a Europe where progress is about to obliterate reputation and society is about to come roaring down on itself, thanks to the guns of the Western Front and the Russian revolution. Each piece is overshadowed by the tension of imminent social revolution and breakdown.

Yet Enemies is clearly far more the period piece. The revolution that destroyed Gorky's middle class did not, in the end, come to Chislehurst. A hundred years after Granville Barker's play, it is still there, still a notch on London's commuter belt. Indeed, there are probably Voysey descendants even now commuting daily up to London Bridge and an accountancy firm in Holborn.

Equally, the peril faced by Gorky's bourgeoisie is physically much more real. Time is running out for them in quite a different way. The Russian factory owner Zakhar Bardin must cope with armed soldiers and stony-faced "socialists" in bare feet, while over at the National all that Edward Voysey has to deal with are his personal morality and the nasty matter of some missing money. Much easier.

But this does not mean The Voysey Inheritance is the lesser piece. Granville Barker's portrait of mental struggle makes for a riveting evening because his play is still remarkably contemporary. The director, Peter Gill, could have dumped the leg-of-mutton sleeves and the whiskers and got away with it.

At the Almeida, however, Michael Attenborough directs a production that, for all its brilliant performances, is forced to toe the period line. Enemies, despite the knowing laughter it elicits (thanks to a series of gags about a hopeless government), is still very much a sepia-toned portrait of a doomed society, haplessly in thrall to fishing and vodka, with a marching proletariat so close, it is practically breathing down its neck.

Well, it's no one's fault. Maxim Gorky could not have foreseen the utter transformation of Russia, any more than Granville Barker could have predicted the survival of Chislehurst.

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