During recessions, jokes do the rounds in theatre about the cuts now being so bad that upcoming productions include Shakespeare’s “One Gentleman of Verona” and Chekhov’s “Two Sisters”. So, finding the Turgenev play usually known in English as A Month in the Country now turning up at the National under the title Three Days in the Country, you wonder if this humour has proved prophetic.In fact, adapter-director Patrick Marber is being scrupulously accurate to the narrative. The play – published in Russian in 1855, though not staged until 1872 – takes place over a single weekend, although the characters have already spent several weeks at the country estate, setting up desires and depressions that are about to explode, by the time we meet them.