David Essex fighting aliens? The end is nigh!

The War Of The Worlds (Dominion Theatre) Verdict: Armageddon out of here! ★★✩✩✩ Uncle Vanya (Almeida Theatre) Verdict: Ravishingly bleak ★★★★✩

ROCKERS of a certain age may still revere Jeff Wayne’s 1978 music for H. G. Wells’s story The War Of The Worlds, but it was not a good idea to expose his orchestral sci-fi fantasy to the stage.

Nor is it doing the cult prog-rock double album any favours to flesh it out with Seventies co-veterans David Essex and Jimmy Nail, plus liam Neeson keeping his distance by pre-recording his part as the narrator.

The result falls somewhere between naff stadium rock and a very silly B-Movie, as a ramp of nubile violinists duel with ageing blokes on guitar.

Around them, projections of Victorian photos swirl, actors spin in mid- air, plumes of flame erupt across the stage and daft re-creations of arthritic Martian armies inspire nothing so much as mirth.

The rocket that the aliens blast from Mars looks like a giant suppository that embeds itself in the grassy rump of Horsell Common in Surrey. Cue kettle drums, wah-wah pedals and barbecue effects.

Out of the space pod emerges a sewage life-form that mutates into a bug- eyed death-ray war machine on spindly legs.

Nail is a zombie pastor waving a crucifix at the Martian death squads, while Essex dresses as a blacksmith to play The Voice Of Humanity, sidling on and off looking very, very concerned.

As writhing dancers portray red Martian tumbleweed, it is melodrama on steroids, kitsch on stilts. Some will love that — but, for me, armageddon out of here!

SADLY, i confess to being a sucker for russian miserablism. This late Chekhov play about listless provincial failures lamenting the wreckage of their dismal lives is particularly fine.

But i could have sworn it wasn’t this long. At nearly three-and-a-half hours, even i began to give up hope of robert icke’s protracted modern-day version ever ending.

We are made to suffer in almost real time alongside a cast of contemporary bohemian wastrels stuck in the back of beyond. They analyse themselves, rant at each other and collapse into the weeping despair of bitter disappointment and unrequited love. What’s not to like?!

Jeans and dishevelment are the couture of the day in which our hero Paul rhys is an implacably louche, burnt-out wreck.

yet Chekhov rooted his play in the detail of his time, and i didn’t recognise this lot as modern types. Where are the iPads, supermarkets and traffic jams?

Not only is it almost impossible to be isolated in the country any more, but who is this handsome family doctor doing country rounds (a tenaciously depressed Tobias Menzies)? Sign him up, 111!

And who is this young beauty (Vanessa Kirby), loyal to a loveless marriage with a curmudgeonly academic (Hilton Mcrae)? in your dreams, Mister. The nearest we come to a credible person is Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton’s lady Sybil) as the lovelorn tomboy who runs the farm.

Directors like Chekhov because he lets us laugh at despair like few modern writers. But even if icke’s all-too-hypothetical characters are trapped in theatrical limbo, the acting is never less than ravishingly bleak.