Uncle Vanya review, Harold Pinter Theatre: Toby Jones is stunning in this sensitive but safe production


Rumpled and wretched: Toby Jones stars in Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter theatre


The quintessential Chekhovian anti-hero, Uncle Vanya is a character that has had Toby Jones’s name written all over it for a while. Jones (son of the late Freddie) has arrived at stardom by specialising in peculiarities, misfits, ‘little guys’.

Two years ago at the Harold Pinter, he was embittered, truculent, haunted and hunted Stanley in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Now, for director Ian Rickson again, he brings similar shades of rumpled, resentful expression to bear on a man who has toiled on a provincial estate on behalf of his academic brother in law (Serebryakov) only to hit middle-age and obsess that he has been conned out of his share of happiness (and achievement).

Assisted by a nuanced, if occasionally foul-mouthed new version by Conor McPherson, again he delivers a bravura performance, even more affecting this time round. That’s partly because all of us can (or will) identify with the anguish of those who don’t feel they’ve got their dues.

But also Jones doesn’t put a foot wrong as he gingerly steps around a vast living-room area where everyone is battling deathly ennui. It takes a kind of bravery to be so diffident on stage: Jones rubs his hands awkwardly round his neck, behind his ears, sticks them in his pockets; he squints, sidles here and there, leans for support on tables and chairs.

I’ve seen angrier Vanyas (Roger Allam), more melancholy Vanyas (Simon Russell Beale). I’m not sure I’ve seen any better catch the tragicomic mixture of fury and futility when – re-roused to ire at talk of the estate being sold-off – Jones’s frantically unhappy nobody runs amok with a gun, then subsides into stunned apathy.


You believe he actually wants to kill his perceived nemesis, and see the disgust turn in on itself; there’s nothing cuddly about it, it’s ugly stuff. The handling of the ineffably moving ending is perfectly judged too. The dejected (and amorously rejected) Vanya is joined at the resumption of his desk-work by his (equally unlucky in love) niece Sonya – played throughout with an almost heartbreaking youthful radiance by Aimee Lou Wood (a notable face on the far-different Netflix series Sex Education).

She looks tearily upwards, affirming faith in a deity and some kind of heavenly posterity; his sad sidelong glances at her say nothing (and everything) in reply. Elsewhere, the ensemble is a store-house of talent, each given their moments. Richard Armitage is the dashing, tree-hugging doctor Astrov, foretelling an eco-crisis (the play, published in 1898, feels like an ignored warning from history); he strips to the waist, heads into a downpour, gets giddily drunk, briefly sheds his cares. No quibbles about the other men too: Ciaran Hinds is imposing as Serebryakov but duly bowed with a sense that he’s dead-wood; Peter Wight is nicely agitated as a Falstaffian estate-staffer, Telegin.


The women easily match them: Dearbhla Molloy is strikingly severe as Vanya’s mother, not a background figure; Anna Calder-Marshall is a knitting, scuttling, wise old bird (Nana); Rosalind Eleazar combines transparent beauty, veiled irritation and veneer-shredding yearning as the professor’s second wife, Yelena.

My only real complaint is that it’s all a bit business as usual - a sensitive period Chekhov. Prince Charles reckons we’ve got just 10 years to fix the climate crisis or its curtains. Can we actually afford another reading of this classic that dwells on its passing psychic storms, rather than brings home its dire forecast?

Until May 2. Tickets: 0844 871 7622; atgtickets.com

Uncle Vanya': Theater Review

Toby Jones and Richard Armitage in 'Uncle Vanya'
Johan Persson
3:00 PM PST 1/23/2020 by Demetrios Matheou


THE BOTTOM LINE
Who knew Chekhov could be such fun?
RUNS THROUGH
5/2/2020
Toby Jones, Richard Armitage and Ciarán Hinds head the ensemble in Conor McPherson's new Chekhov adaptation, directed by Ian Rickson.
Arguably the most difficult aspect of presenting Chekhov is finding the tonal balance in his tragicomedy. The characters' navel-gazing self-pity can be so demanding that sometimes you have to resist the urge to jump on stage and give them a good slap. There is no such issue in Conor McPherson's brilliant, buoyantly accessible adaptation of Uncle Vanya, directed with customary verve by Ian Rickson, which recognizes and enriches the play's essential duality — the funnier this is, the sadder and more painful it becomes.

Moreover, McPherson's lithe, light, modern, bittersweet text is in the hands of an excellent ensemble who collectively elicit our indulgence, led by a barnstorming comic performance from Toby Jones. Suddenly the ennui and personal disappointments of fin de siècle landowners and their hangers-on have the ring of familiarity.

Rickson and designer Rae Smith reunite after their recent, outstanding Rosmersholm, the latter again creating a wondrously evocative, immersive set — this time, the drawing room of a provincial country house, high and wide, brick walls reaching into the rafters, Bruno Poet's lighting streaming through rickety French windows, through which greenery also seems to be invading the house. The whole has a kind of rundown rustic elegance, which suits a family whose fortunes appear to be slipping out of their control.

From left: Toby Jones, Aimee Lee Wood and Rosalind Eleazar in Uncle Vanya
Johan Persson
There are immediate laughs, appropriately at the expense of middle-aged men obsessed with their age. "Have I changed?" asks Astrov (Richard Armitage), fishing for compliments from the one person with whom he ought to be on safe ground, the doting Nana (Anna Calder-Marshall), but who replies: "Oh God yes, you used to be gorgeous!" Seconds later the diminutive Vanya leaps from out of a sofa, with a rakish bounce to his step but decidedly worse for wear, complaining that "Everything's the same as ever — except worse."

Vanya has been "cast adrift" by the arrival of his brother-in-law, Serebryakov (Ciarán Hinds), whose academic career the estate has been funding for years, and his beautiful young wife Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar), on whom Vanya has set his sights. It's unfortunate, then, that he's rubbing a stain from his crotch at just the moment she enters the room.

Jones' performance here brings to mind the late, great Leonard Rossiter, particularly Rossiter's sitcom mode: the acerbic intelligence, the wiliness, the snivelling ingratiation. And some of McPherson's dialogue for Vanya, in particular, has the immediacy of sitcom, as when he describes Serebryakov as "a knobbly old croaker" and whirls around the room in vitriolic complaint.

The actor's lightness of touch is matched by others, notably Armitage, who gives the cerebral, idealistic doctor an engagingly sweet personality — a great, big, silly, handsome man, who has suffered through being a fish out of water in the provinces and become a bit too fond of the bottle. The scene in which Vanya, Astrov and perennial spare part Telegin (the ever-dependable Peter Wight) cavort drunkenly in the night is a joy — Wight playing forlornly on his guitar as Armitage exploits his manly figure to strip and dash into the thunderstorm and Jones, utilizing his own quite different physiognomy, climbs into a writing desk and disappears.


Ciarán Hinds in Uncle Vanya
Johan Persson
However, these larks are quickly followed by tender pathos, as the gulf in affection between Astrov and the lovesick Sonya (the touching Aimee Lou Wood) is made painfully apparent. And Chekhov's characters are as lost, disappointed, frustrated, lovelorn and downright depressed as ever — the country folk bitter at variously wasted lives, Yelena trapped with a much older husband she doesn't love. It's debatable who is the greater catalyst for the crises to come: the professor, whom Hinds makes exactly as maddening as he should be — an egotistic, hypochondriac, draining ingrate, wondering why no one loves him while calculating how to milk them dry; or Yelena, dying of boredom while inadvertently driving both Vanya and Astrov mad with love.

If only they weren't all so hard on themselves. After all, Astrov commendably fights to save the forests (how prescient Chekhov is here), Vanya has raised a fine young woman, Sonya's work ethic is highly commendable. When Vanya drags Yelena into a dance, imploring her to "let yourself go," it could be a call to arms to the whole household; the fact that none of them could ever heed it, let alone the lugubrious Vanya himself, is where the very relatable tragedy lies.

Incidentally, this feels like a defining performance for Eleazar. The actress was quietly impressive alongside Matthew Broderick in The Starry Messenger last year, and is one of another delightful current ensemble onscreen in The Personal History of David Copperfield. Here she lights up the stage completely, making the elusive Yelena a watchful, amused, seductive presence (her desire for Astrov as he's mulling over his maps is sizzlingly evident), while capturing the crippling identity crisis of a young woman imprisoned by her mistakes.


From left: Toby Jones, Aimee Lee Wood and Rosalind Eleazar in Uncle Vanya
Johan Persson
Venue: The Harold Pinter Theatre, London
Cast: Toby Jones, Richard Armitage, Anna Calder-Marshall, Rosalind Eleazar, Ciarán Hinds, Dearbhla Molloy, Peter Wight, Aimee Lou Wood
Playwright: Anton Chekhov, adapted by Conor McPherson
Director: Ian Rickson
Set designer: Rae Smith
Lighting designer: Bruno Poet
Music: Stephen Warbeck
Sound designer: Ian Dickinson
Presented by Sonia Friedman Productions, Gavin Kalin Productions, Rupert Gavin, Patrick Gracey/Scott M. Delman, 1001 Nights Productions, Tulchin Bartner Productions, in association with Len Blavatnik, Eilene Davidson Productions, Louise & Brad Edgerton

Und hier der Hollywood Reporter - ohne Sterne?

Review: Uncle Vanya (Harold Pinter Theatre)
[b]Richard Armitage returns to the stage to feature in Conor McPherson's new version of the iconic play, with Toby Jones in the titular role

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars[/b]


Sarah Crompton

24 January 2020


There was an audible sob coming from somewhere near me at the conclusion of Uncle Vanya. I had a lump in my throat. When a play written in 1898 can make you feel so deeply, then you know you are witnessing something very special – especially since earlier in the evening you have been convulsed with wry laughter.

What director Ian Rickson and his adaptor the Irish playwright Conor McPherson have done is to strip Chekhov of all the barriers that make him seem like a 19th century playwright. This production of Uncle Vanya makes it seem as accessible as a TV drama, without ever betraying the great, melancholy, insightful soul that has made the play last for as long as it has. It is radical and revelatory without ever being gimmicky or insensitive.

Its easy beauty begins with Rae Smith's set which she describes in the programme as a "space of ideas". Instead of offering a realistic view of the country estate where Vanya and his niece Sonya spend their days making money for Sonya's father Professor Serebryakov to spend on his scholarly pursuits, she creates a room where the pipework is exposed, and trees poke through the huge windows. It is old and new, exposed to the elements and a part of them, as timeless as the costumes the characters wear.

McPherson's translation pulls off a similar feat of magical reinvention. It sounds so fresh and so vital that I thought it must have involved huge alteration; in fact, what he has done is trim and polish the language a new robust form. Toby Jones' Vanya talks about "wanging on", and "stuffing my face with snacks" but the sentiments of the text are unchanged. It is also incredibly funny, both full of verbal lightness and broader elements such as a hilarious drinking scene where Richard Armitage's disillusioned doctor Astrov, Vanya and the old hanger-on Telegin (Peter Wight) crawl under a sideboard in search of fresh supplies while repeating the word "Awight".

This directness allows us to see the play anew. Vanya can, in some productions, feel like a play in which a lot of people sit around and moan about wasting their lives. Here it becomes a drama of missed chances, of people taking the wrong decisions which leave them beached and desperate but trying to put a good face on things. Nowhere is this more true than of Yelena, Serebryakov's young and beautiful second wife, whose languorous presence precipitates passion in both Vanya and Astrov. She is often just a decorative, drawling thing; Rosalind Eleazar preserves her luminosity but makes her seethe with suppressed fury at the mistakes she has made. Her farewell to Astrov, when instead of kissing him, she wraps her body around him is as sensational as it is unexpected.

Rickson, the most sensitive of directors, delicately draws out the invisible lines that tie these people together, allowing their relationships to develop in subtle and always convincing ways. In doing so, he gently alters the balance of the play. The glue that binds this family is Sonya. As played by Aimee Lou Wood, making her West End debut after finding such success on TV in Sex Education, she is a glorious, kind, gentle girl, whose love for Astrov shines out in the way she quotes his warnings of eco-disaster to come as if she had learnt them by rote. The moment when she tries to kiss him and he avoids her is so perfectly calibrated that is heart-breaking. Her attempts at cheerfulness in the face of so much crushing disappointment are almost unbearable. She positively shines.

Yet there isn't a bad performance on the stage. With his shirt constantly hanging out and his hair always on end, Jones makes Vanya both infinitely loveable and consistently irritating; his sudden lament that "I could have been another Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky," sums up the tragi-comic nature of the character in a phrase. So does the way Jones reveals his deep sorrow and wounded pride, even as he is springing across tables trying to kill his brother in law.

Armitage brings the same finesse to his portrayal of Astrov; he is a romantic, clinging to his dreams of the future, seduced by the perfect woman, unable to see the truth in front of his nose. But he is also a man deeply damaged by his profession, by the suffering he has witnessed, the poverty he can do nothing to cure. Ciarán Hinds is powerful as a monstrously egotistical Serebryakov, Anna Calder-Marshall, Dearbhla Molloy and Peter Wight all lend heft and significance to characters that often count for nought. All in all, a glory.

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Uncle Vanya, Harold Pinter Theatre review - a superlative company achievement
Ian Rickson’s exemplary production relishes the nuances of Conor McPherson's adaptation

by Tom Birchenough

Friday, 24 January 2020


Uncle Vanya must surely be the closest, the most essential of Chekhov’s plays, its cast – just four main players who are caught up in its fraught emotional action, and four who are essentially support – a concentrated unit even by the playwright's lean standards. Its overlapping strands of unrequited love and desperate loneliness are tightly wound, so organically that any one false note risks throwing the whole off balance. That’s never the case in director Ian Rickson’s exquisite production of this new adaptation by Conor McPherson, one which stretches the original in certain directions but succeeds resoundingly in making the turn-of-the-20th-century cares of the original resonate today.

In one particular sense, of course, that contemporary relevance is startling. The ecological concerns articulated by Astrov, the careworn doctor who's as much concerned for the forests that he plants as for the patients that he tends, have an uncanny freshness today, Chekhov’s pessimism about the possibilities of human relationships for once finding a parallel in a world far beyond them. Played with haunting, lean intensity by Richard Armitage, Astrov may be reticent about his private world but he’s forthright about the future of the planet, talking of its “steady irreversible decline”. The bleakness of his prognosis, “Ten more years and the destruction will be complete”, could have come straight from this week’s newspaper headlines.

For these Russian men, as for McPherson’s Irishmen, drinking is more a direction than a diversion That feeling of interconnection between man and nature is nicely caught in Rae Smith’s capaciously elegant design, its tendrils of outside greenery invading the huge interior space through the high windows that partially illuminate it. Colour and light seem to struggle here against a wider blackness: the further the eye retreats, the stronger the sense of mouldering accretions of the past, until it all vanishes into the bare brickwork of the theatre's back wall (Bruno Poet’s lighting captures exactly the sense of light hanging, almost isolated, in darkness).

The nuances of McPherson’s action seem almost bright by comparison, elements of humour and stage business amplified in his treatment. It’s there most clearly in Toby Jones’s Vanya, a figure rumpled even by the standards of that actor, his disgruntlement palpable from the moment we set eyes on him. Booze has always been a defining accent for McPherson’s characters, and his Vanya is as profligate as any in that line: “I drink too much wine which means then I start into the liqueurs which inevitably lead me on to the spirits,” he resounds gloriously at one point, punctuation be damned, trying to fathom how his best intentions have been stealthily purloined. The strains of affectionate remonstration, most of all those from Anna Calder-Marshall’s beautiful old Nana, the quintessential aged retainer who’s as close a part of the family as can be, surely have a more poignant ring of regretful accusation than usual in Chekhov: it comes with the sad resignation that for these Russian men, as for McPherson’s Irishmen, drinking is more a direction than a diversion.

But McPherson flavours Vanya’s disillusionment with an element that’s less familiar from Chekhov – sarcasm (however fine the line in disenchantment may be between that and any more usual mere mordancy). It’s perhaps the single questionable aspect of the adaptation, most of all in a particular moment when Jones goes into a riff that’s as close to Basil Fawlty as John Cleese has ever come (the stage impact is terrific in its way, of course). Elsewhere he may be rebuked, more gently, for his “casual manner, disparaging”, by Telegin (Peter Wight, expansively affable), but his mother (Dearbhla Molloy) goes the whole way and berates him for sarcasm (the introduction of the word into the play is McPherson’s: Chekhov doesn’t use it).

That, as well the fact that his diction shows an obvious familiarity with Cluedo, leaves an impression that this Vanya has been very much nurtured in Anglo-Saxon climes. His cynicism harks back as far even as Shakespeare’s Jacques – and forward, in his companionship with Armitage’s Astrov especially, to some seen-better-days Graham Greene protagonists, not least because McPherson gives them an easily collegiate jargon adopted from some unspecified inter-war generation, all “going a bit wonky”, “off my beanpole”, “wanging on”. “She’s thrown it all away on this old knobbly croaker,” is how Vanya describes the marriage of Yelena (Rosalind Eleazer) to Ciarán Hinds’s aged Serebryakov, whom he addresses in a moment of rare affability as “me old sausage”.

Then from such a faux-Wodehouse world, we are brought back squarely to Russia, and its fatal national ennui. “What good does drinking do either of you?” Aimee Lou Wood’s Sonya asks Vanya, his reply coming back with pitiless laconic exactitude, “It kills the days.” There’s some lovely tipsy business between the two men (“Awight”), but Armitage is never far from the “darker energy” that Chekhov ascribes to him: the one ailment that this doctor, with all his talk of centuries healing the pain, has perhaps failed to diagnose – in himself – could be PTSD. While Vanya can talk of pity – and self-pity is the dominant motif of the play – compassion is another register entirely, one to which Armitage has heartbreakingly limited access, Sonya heartbreakingly more.

Do the female roles feel somehow overshadowed? It’s hard to escape that impression, given the tone of Vanya’s dominant humour, though the performances are superb. Wood’s Sonya is enduringly naif, virtually undeterred by life’s disappointments, that quality accentuated by the accent, starting with her affectionately Northern uz, that she retains throughout. Rosalind Eleazer as Yelena is outstanding, her hinted awareness of freedom coming through early on when she stretches across the table, leading up to that final stolen embrace, a moment clutched desperately out of time; it’s somehow tempered by the faintest hint of snobbery (a McPherson contribution), a register that she shares with Hinds, whose Serebryakov is distinguished by his clipped, vainglorious rasp. Though even Yelena succumbs to a softening of diction in the second half, a hint of an Irish lisp – Nana and Astrov have it too – that suggests that McPherson, or at least his cast, has in mind his own homeland as much as Chekhov’s Russia (environments that are equally far from any notional centre of Europe).

It’s a superlative collective performance from the cast – many of us will be lucky if we see a better one in our lifetimes – one that, though it’s rich in talent well known from elsewhere (screen, especially), play here in newly minted unison. Somehow “ensemble” seems less appropriate a term for Uncle Vanya than for some of the other Chekhov plays, given that it’s the recurring scenes between two actors that resound most powerfully. But Rickson achieves an ensemble effect in a different sense by creating the kind of hush in the theatre that keeps the audience expectant on every utterance, every gesture. It’s moderated only by Stephen Warbeck’s score, all redolent cello and piano, particularly haunting when it plays over the interludes between acts, and the characters move together silently, creating the effect of a higher harmony even as all we see on stage is strife. Sad roses, autumn roses, indeed.

FIRST NIGHT | THEATRE
Uncle Vanya review — new adaptation feels almost impossibly contemporary

As the curtain rises on Ian Rickson’s striking revival of one of the greatest plays, it all looks as beautiful and as stifling as an Old Master. We see the elegant dilapidation of Rae Smith’s country-house set, with foliage breaking through the top of its huge windows; the carved wooden bureau that looks eternal. Should we simply be sounding the sadness klaxon as Chekhov’s tragicomedy starts passing its baton from one life of thwarted desire to another?

Heavens, no. Like so many good versions of classics, Conor McPherson’s new adaptation feels almost impossibly contemporary in the way it packs so much lust, wit, rage and regret into its brisk but unhurried two and a half hours. Yet he doesn’t reinvent Chekhov so much as clear some dust off him: characters talk directly and apologise for “wanging on”. Toby Jones’s endearingly abrasive Vanya artfully deploys one f-word as passions rise. His mother, Mariya (Dearbhla Molloy), a would-be intellectual in Annie Hall-ish blouse and tie, reminds him that whatever his woes at least his gender has allowed him to lead a life of “agency”.

That must sting because you look at Vanya and see nothing other than impotent rage. Bullish, booze-soaked and bedraggled, he grouches like Blackadder one moment, cleans the mess off his trousers the next. A 47-year-old who has seen his life drift in service of his vain older brother-in-law (Ciaran Hinds), an academic whose Moscow pre-eminence has been funded by this estate, Vanya is sizzlingly sardonic and his own worst enemy. Jones once again proves to be the grand master of portraying utterly winning losers. His captivating performance finds the self-awareness and self-blindness alike of a man who, were he alive today, would surely spend his nights trolling “the Professor” online.

It’s no one-man show, however. Richard Armitage from Game of Thrones overdoses on the faraway looks at first as Dr Astrov, the handsome but ageing local doctor and environmentalist who is as close as Chekhov came to a self-portrait, but his sozzled later scenes expose all the doctor’s shallowly buried passion. Rosalind Eleazar renders the professor’s wife, Yelena, spoilt yet sympathetic, elegant yet desperate. It’s a name-making performance. Every character, though, including those depicted in beguiling supporting turns from Peter Wight and Anna Calder-Marshall, is visibly doing what they think they have to do to get by. And if the youthful naivety of Aimee Lou Wood as Sonya is too flat at first, her final speech of duty and doom is deliberately unhistrionic.

Her unrequited love for Astrov aside, these raggedly respectable Russians tend to speak their minds in a way that their English equivalents would not. Rickson frames all that awfully funny, awfully sad rambunctiousness in a way that finally returns everyone to the tableau of painterly stasis they started with. Yet within these moments of mooning around a country estate, such argy-bargy, such compassion, such life.
Box office: 0844 8717622, to May 2; haroldpintertheatre.co.uk

Review - Uncle Vanya starring Richard Armitage at the Harold Pinter Theatre
Uncle Vanya starring Toby Jones and Richard Armitage review
Our critics rating:
Date:
24 January, 2020, 07:07
Review by:
Mark Shenton
Michael Billington recently wrote a feature for The Guardian in which he commented that he's seen nearly two dozen productions of Uncle Vanya in over 60 years as a theatregoer (48 of them as a critic); and even if I can't (yet) claim quite those numbers on any of those scores, like Billington I consider it to be my personal favourite of all of Chekhov's plays - indeed, I'd go even further and say it's my favourite play, period, from a writer who I consider my favourite of all the classic playwrights. I try to never miss an opportunity to see it; and in the last few years, these have included, for me, spellbinding productions at the Almeida (in 2016, which I gave a five-star review to on this site) and Manchester's Home (in 2017), with a rather less satisfying version at Hampstead Theatre in 2018.

So the new West End production has a lot to live up to; and if it is not quite as radical as Robert Icke's Almeida re-working, which I dubbed "a crushingly brilliant new take on an all-too-familiar play", this more conventionally staged version has a masterly sense of pace and place, with director Ian Rickson orchestrating a mostly stellar cast in a beautifully nuanced account of the play that fully embraces its tender, funny, sad and crushingly comic notes in turn.

Rickson, who also has a long relationship with Connor McPherson who provided the new version of the play used here that saw him staging the premieres of McPherson's plays The Weir and Dublin Carol, also previously directed Chekhov's The Seagull at the Royal Court in a production that subsequently transferred to Broadway. One of our very best directors of new plays, he has also increasingly demonstrated his facility for commercial outings of classic revivals that shine fascinating new light on them

Here this is achieved by a deliberately muted, unshowy emphasis on performance, with three leading performances that unassertively each glow with crushed, repressed feelings that they dare to expose. Toby Jones' unrequited passion for Rosalind Eleazar's beautiful Yelena, who is in turn desperately in love with Richard Armitage's Astrov, provides the painful anchors to the drama; there's also unrequited passion in Aimee Lou Wood's Sonya, also in love with Astrov, but this is less convincingly caught.

But elsewhere there's also rich support from Ciaran Hinds' Professor Serebrakhov, Anna Calder-Marshall's Nana, Dearbhla Molloy as Vanya's mother and Peter Wight as Waffles to make this a piercing production in which you really get to know each character.

This is both a play and a production that speaks to the yearning chasms of existential despair in life, love, aspiration, inheritance and unfulfilled ambitions; it also, thrillingly and presciently, addresses concerns about the impact of deforestation, and yet also of hopes for a better prospect of happiness for the generations that will come after the characters in it. In other words, it is at once an unstintingly bleak portrait of the state of an unhappy family and the stultifying dull lives they're enduring in rural Russia, yet also so imbued with a recognisable humanity that it is also a heartfelt portrait in that very sense of endurance and the necessity to do so, against the odds.

This richly detailed production is housed within a stunning set by Rae Smith, gorgeously lit by Bruno Poet and hauntingly scored by composer Stephen Warbeck.

At a time when the current fashion is to view Chekhov through a different cultural lens, as the National are doing with Three Sisters relocated to Nigeria, it is both refreshing and even radical to go back to Chekhovian basics and produce a more faithful version like this in the West End that demonstrates what a masterpiece the play is without the need for reinvention.

No wonder Vanya's mad about Yelena: PATRICK MARMION reviews Uncle Vanya
By Patrick Marmion for the Daily Mail
01:33 GMT 24 Jan 2020 , updated 01:37 GMT 24 Jan 2020

Good as they are, there's something much more interesting going on in this Uncle Vanya than the star double bill of Toby Jones and Richard Armitage.

Jones is best known for the Truman Capote film Infamous and oodles of TV; Armitage played Thorin in The Hobbit film trilogy and was the Northern hunk in TV's North And South.

But the best thing about Ian Rickson's production of Anton Chekhov's maudlin masterpiece is a ravishingly bored, passionate and tender performance from Rosalind Eleazar as Yelena.


The first time I saw Eleazar was when she stole the show from Matthew Broderick in The Starry Messenger last year. Here, again, she proves a major force in a role that isn't normally taken seriously.

The plaudits in Uncle Vanya productions usually go to one of the two men. And, yes, Armitage is convincing as a warmly needy, 19th-century provincial doctor who's all too in love with the bottle.

Earnest and stressed, his real passion is as an eco-warrior, desperate to defend and develop his woodland estate.

Jones, meanwhile, takes the title role as the middle-aged man who's spent his life in a rural backwater, struggling to maintain his own family estate, while his swanky older brother (Ciaran Hinds) lives it up in Moscow as a famous professor.

I didn't entirely believe Jones's Vanya had fallen in love with his brother's young wife (Eleazar).

With his scraps of indirectional hair, he sends himself up like a derelict version of Ian Hislop. But I wanted more of the pain of his doomed devotion to Yelena.

As for Eleazar, she lights up Rae Smith's industrial gothic set. As the trophy wife of Hinds's cranky alpha male, she's at first tired and listless, with the look of an off-duty Amazonian goddess.

And as a goddess, she shatters the world of Chekhov's characters, lyrically reimagined in Conor McPherson's version of the play.

Jones's leery Vanya is desperate to get his paws on her, but Armitage's dithering doctor dare not even dream.


Her Yelena is mesmerisingly open at times; clouded with personal frustration at others.


Eleazar almost unbalances the production, but Aimee Lou Wood also wins hearts as Vanya's lovelorn niece Sonya, who yearns for the doctor, while Hinds is potent as a blustering, controlling bore.

There is gorgeous colour from Peter Wight, Anna Calder-Marshall and Dearbhla Molloy. But in Eleazar, Rickson's found gold.

Time Out says
4 out of 5 stars
Toby Jones is phenomenal in this tender take on Chekhov’s masterpiece

If you think we’re all screwed, pity the poor characters in Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’. Unsuccessful, bored and desperately, desperately lonely, they’re hurtling deeper and deeper into middle age with little in the way of prospects or legacy. And of course they’re all about to be zapped by the Russian Revolution – a prescient air that hangs over all of Chekhov’s plays but here wilfully underscored by adapter Conor McPherson, who has nudged the 1898 play forward by a decade or so.

Nonetheless, Ian Rickson’s revival is a long way away from pure misery. Maybe it’s the chill touch of my own encroaching middle years talking, but I found McPherson’s take the most relatable I’ve seen.

‘Vanya’ is the most malleable of Chekhov’s plays in terms of potential for lols, and this version finds a sweet spot between companionable chuckles and icy despair. Toby Jones is terrific in a vivid, vanity-free take on the title role. At first his sadsack estate administrator comes across as a faintly unbearable pub-bore type, and yet he won me over: he’s decent, witty and has a painfully, often humorously clear view of himself – well aware that he’s far less attractive than his lifelong friend Doctor Astrov.

The strapping Richard Armitage plays the doctor as a charmingly unworldly figure, whose good looks have eased his passage through life. He has fallen into drink but not yet despair; and despite having his admirers, Vanya is the one he really has a connection with. They’re an odd couple, but when they’re boozing away through the night they are both pitiable and pitch perfect – old pals who’ve never really been able to change, summoning that camaraderie for one more night on the lash. And it’s all quite recognisable. London is nothing if not a city full of Vanyas and Astrovs, middle-aged people living out a version of their youths. I know plenty of Vanyas and Astrovs.

But at least they have Stoke Newington to live in. Chekhov’s creations are stuck in the rural Russian provinces, at the mercy of Ciarán Hinds’s infuriatingly self-absorbed Serebryakov, whose total lack of empathy for anybody else borders on the elemental. Hope, such as it is, is manifested by his daughter Sonya. As played by the excellent Aimee Lou Wood, she is visibly, palpably younger than everyone else, and despite the emotional battering she receives over the two-and-a-half hours of Rickson’s production, she is ultimately unbowed, determined to move on in a way the older folks can’t or won’t.

Rickson’s productions are never knowingly unexquisite, and his ‘Vanya’ is beautifully lit by Bruno Poet, shafts of late summer sun drifting in through the windows of Rae Smith’s evocative set, which presents Serebryakov’s house in subtly abstract fashion, overwhelmed on the one side by a spreading thicket of weeds. Sometimes, dare I say it, Rickson’s extreme exquisiteness can lead to slightly dull productions. That’s absolutely not the case here: the play comes to the boil in the scene where a furious, despairing Vanya confronts Serebryakov, and it’s played just right here. Jones is note-perfect: sad but also genuinely hilarious. He even manages to claw back some dignity confronting Hinds about his monstrous dickishness. Unlike many productions, it’s much more about vindication than humiliation.

It’s still a lament for losing your way in your middle years. But it’s also a tender tribute to the small joy that remains – and on the occasions when the sparks fly, it’s even exhilarating.

BY: ANDRZEJ LUKOWSKI

POSTED: FRIDAY JANUARY 24 2020

From the get-go (a phrase that one half expects to hear in Conor McPherson's contemporary update of Anton Chekhov's text) there's a big old laugh that resonates round the theatre and I inwardly relaxed just a little. With Chekhov, one sometimes wants to ask of one's immediate neighbours, "That's a laugh line, isn't it? We're supposed to be laughing, aren't we? I know we were crying two minutes ago and we'll be tearful again in another two, but...".

BWW Review: UNCLE VANYA, Harold Pinter TheatreNobody quite walks the tightrope between comedy and tragedy with the aplomb of the Russian master, and it's a delight to see the ensemble execute the twists and turns of the peerless prose, as we learn of the pompous Professor, the green Doctor and the disappointed niece.
Toby Jones is at the heart of it as Vanya, a sour, bitter, tragic version of PG Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth, stuck not so much in his country house as in a mind that is filled with regrets. Jones uses all of his charisma to create a sense of empathy with the audience - in less skilful hands, we might turn against his solipsistic victimhood and consider the peasants outside, whose lot was somewhat less comfortable. But we don't - Vanya does deserve more, his bad choices bad, but the price paid so, so high.

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BWW Review: UNCLE VANYA, Harold Pinter Theatre
by Gary Naylor Jan. 24, 2020

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BWW Review: UNCLE VANYA, Harold Pinter TheatreFrom the get-go (a phrase that one half expects to hear in Conor McPherson's contemporary update of Anton Chekhov's text) there's a big old laugh that resonates round the theatre and I inwardly relaxed just a little. With Chekhov, one sometimes wants to ask of one's immediate neighbours, "That's a laugh line, isn't it? We're supposed to be laughing, aren't we? I know we were crying two minutes ago and we'll be tearful again in another two, but...".

BWW Review: UNCLE VANYA, Harold Pinter TheatreNobody quite walks the tightrope between comedy and tragedy with the aplomb of the Russian master, and it's a delight to see the ensemble execute the twists and turns of the peerless prose, as we learn of the pompous Professor, the green Doctor and the disappointed niece.
Toby Jones is at the heart of it as Vanya, a sour, bitter, tragic version of PG Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth, stuck not so much in his country house as in a mind that is filled with regrets. Jones uses all of his charisma to create a sense of empathy with the audience - in less skilful hands, we might turn against his solipsistic victimhood and consider the peasants outside, whose lot was somewhat less comfortable. But we don't - Vanya does deserve more, his bad choices bad, but the price paid so, so high.


This is a true ensemble piece (even we're involved, as the fourth wall is broken continually) and you can't wait for another character to pipe up with an aperçu or two.

Richard Armitage's Doctor Astrov oscillates between the fire of his Greta-ish warnings of environmental apocalypse (not much updating required there - Chekhov could see it unfolding at the dawn of the 20th century) and his reliance on the booze to numb the ennui. You see how vulnerable he was to the merest hint of interest from the beautiful Yelena.

Ciarán Hinds veers close to caricature as the academic for whom Vanya has worked all his bloody life, but there's nothing feeds an ego like the prospect of citations lining up and positive peer reviews - then as now. Peter Wight has a lot of fun as hanger-on, Telegin, especially in the rain - I'll say no more...

In this version, more than any others I've seen, the women get to deliver the emotional gut-punches that balance the humour. Anna Calder-Marshall sets the tome with that early laugh, but is soon sent to shoo away the peasants at the gate, the hierarchy of servants evident.

Dearbhla Molloy flits in and out of the drawing room (Rae Smith's set depicting a decrepit, but functional, space, a three-dimensional portent of Vanya's future), dazzled by the Professor, unable to see how his selfishness is ratcheted up still further with his fateful proposal for the estate, driving Vanya into madness.

But the relationship between the Professor's young wife, Yelena, and Vanya's young niece, Sonya, continually draws the eye and pulls at the heartstrings. These two intelligent women are trapped - Yelena with her preposterous husband and too easy life, and Sonya in an unrequited passion for the Doctor, displaced by manic work.

Rosalind Eleazar and Aimee Lou Wood break your heart with their fates, as much because they must be separated from each other (their lives would be so much better if Sonya shared some of her work with Yelena) as from real love. Astrov is a damn fool if you ask me!

Director Ian Rickson has created a Vanya for 2020 that can be enjoyed by a first-timer as much as by a veteran of Seagulls, Sisters and Orchards past. Amy Ball has assembled a perfect cast to deliver that vision and they do not disappoint.

Vanya himself has every right to ask for more - I'm not sure that we do, though.

Uncle Vanya review: Toby Jones is in his comic prime in a retooled Chekhov for our times
Reviewed by NICK CURTIS
2 hours ago
The alchemy of this retooled Vanya, combining a top-notch creative team with serious actors who are currently having A Moment, works brilliantly. I’d call it blockbuster Chekhov if it weren’t so subtle and sad.

Toby Jones is in his comic prime in the title role, a man faced with the waste of his life. Hobbit heart-throb Richard Armitage is a forceful if one-dimensional study of self-destructive idealism as his friend and rival, Astrov.

Conor McPherson’s adaptation brings the women into the foreground too. There’s a truly heartbreaking performance from Aimee Lou Wood, the breakout star of Sex Education, as Vanya’s niece Sonya, who is besotted with Astrov. The luminous Rosalind Eleazar brings a cat-like sensuality and a despairing stillness to Yelena, everyone’s object of desire. Even the supporting cast is top-drawer, and the production is directed with wit and finesse by Ian Rickson.

Buy tickets for Uncle Vanya with GO London

McPherson, author of The Weir and Girl From The North Country, sharpens some of the characters’ experiences by giving them monologues. He doesn’t exactly update Chekhov’s play, but gently dials up the contemporary parallels. This approach is echoed in Rae Smith’s set, a gorgeous 19th-century garden room with modern fire exits.

The alchemy of this retooled Vanya, combining a top-notch creative team with serious actors who are currently having A Moment, works brilliantly. I’d call it blockbuster Chekhov if it weren’t so subtle and sad.

Toby Jones is in his comic prime in the title role, a man faced with the waste of his life. Hobbit heart-throb Richard Armitage is a forceful if one-dimensional study of self-destructive idealism as his friend and rival, Astrov.

Conor McPherson’s adaptation brings the women into the foreground too. There’s a truly heartbreaking performance from Aimee Lou Wood, the breakout star of Sex Education, as Vanya’s niece Sonya, who is besotted with Astrov. The luminous Rosalind Eleazar brings a cat-like sensuality and a despairing stillness to Yelena, everyone’s object of desire. Even the supporting cast is top-drawer, and the production is directed with wit and finesse by Ian Rickson.


McPherson, author of The Weir and Girl From The North Country, sharpens some of the characters’ experiences by giving them monologues. He doesn’t exactly update Chekhov’s play, but gently dials up the contemporary parallels. This approach is echoed in Rae Smith’s set, a gorgeous 19th-century garden room with modern fire exits.



Five Anton Chekhov plays everyone needs to know
An asset-rich, cash-poor rural family is in service to a metropolitan elitist. Serebryakov (Ciaran Hinds), fathered Sonya with Vanya’s sister, then married Yelena after her death, and expects others to support his unreadable writings. Meanwhile the peasants outside are grubbing in the compost heap.

Vanya’s mother (Dearbhla Molloy) berates him for failing to exert his authority because she, as a woman, never had any. Astrov is a vegetarian environmentalist suffering burnout. Characters from 1898 predict that unhappiness will be solved in 100 years. Ha! Rickson’s production has moments of high comedy — Astrov chasing Vanya round the table — but remains essentially melancholic. Jones deftly balances pathos and humour, but he is matched by Eleazar and Wood. This is a Vanya for our times.

Warum eigentlich nur 4 Sterne, "Time out London"?