Uncle Vanya: Will Gompertz reviews Chekhov's play on film ★★★★★


Will Gompertz
Arts editor
@WillGompertz BBCon Twitter



There are not many upsides to the wrecking ball that is the current pandemic. So many lives and livelihoods have been lost it is often difficult to see beyond the devastation. It's been a relentless grind of bad news heaped upon bad news. Good news has become as elusive as waiting for the apocryphal bus: you hang around for ages and then two come along at once, only for you to realise you've forgotten your mandatory mask.

It is all a bit dispiriting.

Not unlike one of those Chekhov plays in which everyone is miserable to differing degrees. "I am at least as unhappy as you" says Sonya to Uncle Vanya in a bid to out-glum the man who brought her up on a down-at-heel country estate in Russia.

I know this, not because I am able to quote Russian 19th Century playwrights at will, but because I've just watched a filmed version of the critically-lauded Uncle Vanya theatre production that was abruptly halted in March due to Covid-19. Having done so, I am delighted to report that I have some good news…

It is excellent.

Better still, you can actually see it (in cinemas later this month, or on the BBC later this year), which you probably wouldn't have been able to do had it completed its West End run at The Harold Pinter Theatre where tickets were selling faster than second homes in New Zealand.

All but one of the original theatre cast are in the cinema production, which was filmed at the mothballed Harold Pinter Theatre, where Rae Smith's wonderfully evocated faded-glory set remained intact and in-situ.

Filming stage plays for the screen is not straightforward. It is easy to fall into the trap of having the worst of both worlds: no atmosphere, and no detail. That is emphatically not the case in this instance.

Ross MacGibbon has skilfully reinterpreted Ian Rickson's highly praised stage direction with the deployment of six cameras, a first-class sound mix, and superb editing (apart from a couple of rushed cutaways).

It is not so much a film of a play, but a play on film - not unlike Denzel Washington's movie version of August Wilson's Fences, or Roman Polanski's celluloid remake of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage.

Toby Jones reprises his role as the eponymous Uncle Vanya in what is a lively new adaptation by Conor McPherson ("wanging" hardly being a Chekhovian word). Jones, who is perhaps best known for playing Lance - the downbeat, oddball treasure hunter in Detectorists - gives us a downbeat, oddball Uncle Vanya who has taken to drink to numb the pain of a wasted life.

He despises his brother-in-law Professor Serebryakov (an appropriately haughty Roger Allam), whom he once revered but now recognises as a fraud with as much substance as a "soap bubble".

To make matters worse, Serebryakov has retired and come to live in the vast but dilapidated country house Vanya has struggled to keep going for the past 25 years, with the help of his good-natured niece Sonya, played with aplomb by the very impressive Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education).

To make matters worse still, Serebryakov's much younger second wife, Yelena (the talented Rosalind Eleazar), is the love of Vanya's life. Unfortunately, the feeling is not mutual...

Yelena: Vanya, you know what happens every time you talk to me about love?

Vanya: No, tell me

Yelena: I feel completely dead

Vanya: Well, that's not good.

Jones is an entertaining presence throughout, lightening the mood when needed with his abundant comic gifts, or dampening it with a trademark pitiful look or snide remark. He is the star around whom all others orbit, not least the strung-out Doctor Astrov (Richard Armitage), who shares Vanya's love of booze and Yelena.

The scene in which Astrov shows Yelena his painted maps of the local landscape, pointing out a fast-approaching ecological calamity, is as good as any you will see on film or on stage. The pent-up passion, their shared hopelessness, the marginal misunderstandings, all combine to create a desperately sad, sensual atmosphere, which both actors play with notable deftness.

Uncle Vanya belongs to a different time and a different place, but like all good plays it lives on and resonates for each epoch.

Chekhov's concerns for the environment, for over-worked and underappreciated medics, for all those who feel trapped by their lives, feel wholly relevant. The astute and sometimes comic way in which these themes are explored, along with other timeless concerns such as unrequited love, boredom and unfulfilled potential, gives Uncle Vanya its power and purpose.

It is a great work of art.

Admittedly, it probably won't leave you beaming from ear-to-ear, but it will touch your heart and soul.

Film
Uncle Vanya review – coronavirus gives Chekhov a shot in the arm
The pandemic supercharges the atmosphere in this film version of Ian Rickson’s recent stage production

Susannah Clapp
@susannahclapp
Sun 18 Oct 2020 10.30 BST

Here is an extraordinary, transfiguring leap from stage to screen. Ian Rickson’s production of Uncle Vanya was cut short by lockdown in the final weeks of its run. Now, in collaboration with director Ross MacGibbon, he has not merely captured his original staging but dazzlingly reinterpreted it. This is not, like the NTLive broadcasts, an attempt to transmit a theatrical event. It is a new thing. The film crackles with fresh intensity – and gains new shadows from the timing of its release.


Chekhov’s 1899 play is prefaced by shots of the cast arriving – dungarees and masks – at the Harold Pinter theatre for the first time since March: shaking out umbrellas, walking into an empty auditorium. As the action begins, something extraordinary happens. We are transplanted in time and place – there is nothing 21st-century British about Rae Smith’s lofty, crumbling design, the sodden glimmer of Bruno Poet’s lighting or old Nana with her long dark dress and bun, patiently waiting on everyone. Yet the stage is charged with the climate of Covid-19. That combination of sluggishness and highly tuned irritability, the feeling of time mysteriously slipping by, maliciously cheating people of their lives, is everywhere: in Toby Jones’s crosspatch, crumpled Vanya and Rosalind Eleazar’s Yelena, so heavy with disappointment she is scarcely able to move. The lassitude of Chekhov’s characters is sometimes spoken of as if it were a mental elegance: here, it is plainly toxic; everyone might be hung over after a too-long afternoon nap.

When I saw this on stage in February the use of direct address to the audience struck me as too blunt. Filmed close-ups banish this difficulty - it is as if we have a direct wire into the speakers’ brains. The strong original cast is enhanced by the addition of Roger Allam, effortlessly condescending as the pampered professor. In this sharp modern version by Conor McPherson, the environmental alarm of the play is more startling than ever. It is often said that an elderly play is nevertheless a play for today. This one truly is.

Susannah Clapp is the Observer’s theatre critic. Visit unclevanyaplay.com for cinema screenings

Sam Marlowe
Sam Marlowe trained and worked as an actor before becoming a full-time arts writer with a special interest in theatre and performance. She ...full bio


Every melancholy detail pierces in this screen version of Ian Rickson’s acclaimed Chekhov production


The days blur together, money is a constant nagging anxiety, drinking kills time and numbs the pain – and every morning the ghastly waking nightmare begins again. Like all great works of art, Chekhov’s sorrowful family drama always confronts us with our own reflection; right now, its depiction of stifling, isolated domestic life and fear of the future feels agonisingly immediate.

Ian Rickson’s production opened in January, its run cut short by lockdown. In August, it was remounted and filmed at the otherwise closed and deserted Harold Pinter Theatre.

A cinematic prologue and epilogue capture the process with delicate melancholy. The cast members arrive at the theatre in the rain, dress in their costumes and wait in the wings. The camera glances across the dully gleaming stage floorboards, the untouched props, the uninhabited set, the empty auditorium. It is eerie, elegiac. After the final bows, smoke from snuffed-out candles drifts into the air, pale and ghostly.

In between, Chekhov’s drama of love, loss and despair is handled with skill and sensitivity by Rickson, master of tone and texture. Conor McPherson’s adaptation has an ease and unobtrusive modernity, and screen director Ross MacGibbon swoops in close on the actors’ faces.

We can see every twitch in the jaw of Richard Armitage’s Doctor Astrov, as he frets over his lost youth, or bites back rage at the hypochondriacal selfishness of Roger Allam’s spoilt, poisonous Serebryakov. There’s rheum and weary wisdom in the eyes of Anna Calder-Marshall’s watchful old retainer, Nana. Radiance drains out of Aimee Lou Wood’s earnest young Sonya, as Astrov tramples her heart with unwitting, careless cruelty.


Above all, we witness the bilious frustration and hopeless yearning of Toby Jones’ Vanya, and the tiny, telltale symptoms of his erotic fascination with Serebryakov’s wife, Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar): the rueful, self-mocking desire to please, the gaze that roams over her body like a caress. His adoration infuriates and smothers her but sometimes, if only out of vanity, boredom or emptiness, she responds to it – an indolent, discontented cat craving strokes.

More discreetly poignant are Peter Wight as lonely, gentle neighbour Telegin, resigned to being the butt of every joke for the sake of being included; and Dearbhla Molloy as Vanya’s mother, a woman long thwarted by inadequate men, all wasted potential and pseudo-intellectual posturing.

What we miss, probably inevitably, is a full sense of the organic theatrical whole: of the way in which live experience and spectacle enhance the wider themes (the rhythms and subtleties of ensemble playing, or the overarching symbolism of the crumbling house, foliage snaking through its cracks).

It takes a while, too, to adjust to the echoey acoustic. But Rickson’s production is piercingly close to perfection. And mournful though it is, there’s priceless comfort in that.


Production Details
Production name
Uncle Vanya
Venue
BBC Four
Starts
27/10/2020
Running time
2hrs 35mins
Author
Anton Chekhov
Adaptor
Conor McPherson
Composer
Stephen Warbeck
Director
Ian Rickson, Ross MacGibbon
Set designer
Rae Smith
Costume designer
Rae Smith
Lighting designer
Bruno Poet
Sound designer
Ian Dickinson
Casting director
Amy Ball
Cast
Roger Allam, Toby Jones, Richard Armitage, Aimee Lou Wood, Anna Calder-Marshall, Dearbhla Molloy, Rosalind Eleazar, Peter Wight
Producer
Angelica Films, BBC Arts, Sonia Friedman Productions

REVIEWS
Review: Uncle Vanya on screen (Harold Pinter Theatre)
The cast of the show, which had to cut short its run due to the pandemic, return for a special recorded performance
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
AuthorAlex Wood London19 October 2020

Could there be a better play to put in cinemas right now than Uncle Vanya? Presented during less of a belle époque and more of a bel ennui, Vanya's isolated domestic setting, housing a fractious family thrown together by tragedy, hits all the right notes for our Covid-ridden circumstances.

Waves of lassitude wash over the characters, couped up in a countryside manor, constantly unsure if it is they, or the world beyond them, that is slowly decaying. At one point the local doctor, Astrov (a rugged, earnest Richard Armitage), produces a flurry of well-thumbed maps, tracing the slow disappearance of woodland across the area, while lambasting those around him for wasting their lives.

The doctor is there following a request from the wizened professor Alexandre (Roger Allam), beset by aches and pains after having retreated from metropolitan living to dwell with his brother-in-law (the titular Vanya, a typically magnificent Toby Jones) as well as his daughter Sonya (Aimee Lou Wood, making the sort of stage turn that goes above and beyond her already impressive moments in hit sitcom Sex Education). Accompanying him is his new wife Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar, presenting a form of dimmed luminosity as she grapples with the consequences of marrying an older man, blinkered by academia).

While the quality of Conor McPherson's writing (faithful, largely, to Chekhov) and Ian Rickson's initial staging has already proven to wow the critics (you can check out Sarah Crompton's top-notch review of the West End premiere here), a more pertinent question to ask might be, how well does the new cinematic production capture the live magic of an in-the-flesh experience?

Ross MacGibbon, directing the screen version (filmed by the cast in August 2020, with all the necessary Covid tests used) alongside Rickson, plays things a lot differently (but no less effectively) than this year's previous on-stage / screen hit Hamilton. Beginning with the more conventional mid- to wide-shots, over time MacGibbon creeps the camera forwards, flooding the frame with the sparkling sorrow of Sonya's tear-ridden eyes, or Vanya's flicker of pride as her uncle hears her utter Chekhov's famous final lines.

MacGibbon and his team also make the, entirely justified, decision never to let us forget that we're on a West End stage. Ghostlike cans hover in the background of shots, casting spectral light. A blue fire door sign pops up, stained with green mildew. Even more boldly, rather than locked down on tripod or crane, MacGibbon has a tendency to pepper scenes with hand-held shots, trembling as they hover metres from the actors. It makes the piece feel all the more organic – lived in. But this also draws out the tragedy of absent punters – jokes that should be met by ripples of laughter echo into nothingness.

Instead, the chorus of crickets in Bruno Poet's sound design is the ad-hoc audience in an empty space. MacGibbon lets Rae Smith's meticulous set design shine through – small details are picked out and given pride of place – Nana's (Anna Calder-Marshall) move to light a candle at the side of the stage when Sonya's late mother, Vanya's sister, is mentioned in conversation.

Stage legend Allam (who was also in a run over at the Bridge Theatre when the pandemic hit) takes over Ciaran Hinds' role as the unwilling patriarch seemingly unable to connect with his daughter or family members. Whereas Hinds had a cultured naivité, Allam is a blustering, almost insufferable man – the epitome of calculating negligence, wilfully oblivious to the daily toil he places on his family members. A scabby, shabby presence that upsets the pleasant languor that Wood and Jones instill.

One final, haunting chapter comes by way of an epilogue – actors, exhausted, jubilant, hug each other as they slowly shuffle out of an empty West End auditorium, leaving the rows of blue seats to stand sentinel over an unoccupied stage. Hopefully not for too much longer.