Theatre
Theatre review: Uncle Vanya
Muddled thinking mars this production of Chekhov's classic, says John Nathan
January 30, 2020 14:24
Muddled thinking mars this production of Chekhov's classic, says John Nathan
January 30, 2020 14:24In 2012, there were two Vanyas in London that contrasted so greatly they might have been written by different playwrights. Lindsay Posner’s production starring Ken Stott embraced the conventions of realism. The country estate house in which Vanya and his niece Sonya live and work was your classic Russian dacha. Samovars were on the boil and the costumes and furniture all pointed to the period in which Chekhov’s play of 1899 is located. It seemed every possible convention was embraced rather than avoided.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Vakhtangov Theatre rolled into town with a Vanya directed by Rimas Tuminas. In almost every way, it did the opposite of the British production. Vanya and the once idealistic doctor Astrov fed their alcohol addiction not with shots of vodka but the excretions of a home- made still. And there was no house, but an all-enveloping black abyss into which the stage receded, as did eventually Chekhov’s characters.
I mention this because Ian Rickson’s new production starring Toby Jones as Vanya and Richard Armitage as Astrov attempts to avoid the conventions of Posner’s production by, it seems, tilting towards Tuminas’s.
Playwright Conor McPherson’s script is an “adaptation” rather than a translation. This gives him licence to give the dialogue a distinctly modern veneer that climaxes when Jones’s infinitely sardonic Vanya fires a four letter word at his brother-in-law Serebryakov, the pompous academic whose life Vanya, Sonya and their estate has for years existed to support.
McPherson is the author of The Weir, a work that deserves to be in any list of the last century’s greatest plays. Set in a pub, it says everything it needs to within the realism it generates. But for this work McPherson turns to the technique of direct address, something he has used to great effect with later works constructed entirely from monologue.
Here, it’s a technique used by the professor’s new young wife Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar) who guiltily admits to the audience that she knows it is she whom Astrov loves and not poor, good hearted Sonya who is besotted with him. Vanya and Sonya also turn us into their confidants. Yet these moments never reveal anything about what they feel, think, or their condition that Chekhov does not make utterly clear in their natural conversation. Meanwhile designer Rae Smith’s set also goes to great effort to avoid the conventions of realism. The dacha feels more like warehouse. A chandelier gives a sense of fading grandeur but bare brick and steel-framed windows locate the play in a place that begs the nagging question “where the hell are we?”
An article in the programme explains the design concept as being influenced by Chernobyl (why?) and stagnation. But this does not explain why the estate house has fire doors and a bright red, modern fire extinguisher tucked away in one corner as if plonked there by a Westminster Council’s health and safety officer.
Jones’s darkly funny performance is a delight, channelling Vanya’s anger into seething resentment for wasting his life in service to an undeserving someone else. And the environmentalism passionately espoused by Armitage’s charismatic Astrov puts this play right at the centre of our planetary emergency. But the new ideas attached to this classic feel like woolly thinking and the evening falls between the two stools of convention and invention.
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