J.B. Priestley’s 1934 success Eden End has not received a major London revival since Laurence Olivier directed it for the National Theatre in 1973 as a vehicle for his wife, Joan Plowright. We owe a debt of gratitude, then, to the Royal & Derngate’s artistic director Laurie Sansom for his fine production of play that can justly be called a classic.

Unlike Priestley’s better-known Dangerous Corner and An Inspector Calls, which were dashed off in a matter of days, the writer “lived for months in tranquillity”, as he put it, with the characters in Eden End. The result is a play of mood as much as plot, like The Cherry Orchard, with which it has long been compared.

Spellbound at Tuesday’s opening by its pervasive mood of melancholy, I was reminded as much of another Chekhov work, The Three Sisters, with its stoic assertion of the need for people to “live and to work”.

This sentiment (grimly ironic in view of the 1912 setting) is expressed in somewhat similar words at the close of Eden End by its central character Stella Kirby (Charlotte Emmerson). Having fled her home eight years before for a precarious life on the stage, she has now returned for the first time to Eden End, a comfortable house in the Yorkshire Dales, to the delight, and in one-case dismay, of her family.

In the first camp are her unfulfilled, still-to-find-himself young brother Wilfred (Nick Hendrix, in a fine professional debut), who is home on leave from the colonial service; the family’s elderly, good sort retainer Sarah (Carol MacReady); and the widowed paterfamilias (William Chubb), a general practitioner who hides his own mortal sickness even as he administers selflessly to that of others.

Unhappy at the arrival is Stella’s markedly less charismatic sister Lilian (Daisy Douglas). She fears for the survival of her friendship — and possibly more — with the local gentleman farmer Geoffrey Farrant (Jonathan Firth), who had once been the plaything of her older sibling. It is therefore good news for her when the husband no one knew Stella had — a raffish, good sort fellow thespian called Charles Appleby (Daniel Betts) — arrives to complete the party in what has very rapidly become a house of secrets . . .

The acting, direction, design (Sara Perks), lighting (Anna Watson) and music (Jon Nicholls) on display here are all exemplary. This rewarding evening supplies tears and some welcome laughter — especially in a priceless, late-night drunken routine by young Wilfred and dissolute Charles, preceded by their spirited account of the song and dance number I Want to be a Military Man from the Edwardian musical hit Florodora. It’s a hoot.

Until June 25. For tickets: 01604 624811 (www.royalandderngate.co.uk). Eden End is at the Oxford Playhouse from July 12-16. For tickets call 01865 305305 or visit www.oxfordplayhouse.com