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https://www.ft.com/content/adf70afe-435 ... 7a29cd66fe Best new London theatre: Uncle Vanya, Faustus: That Damned Woman, and Kunene and the King
Chekhov and Marlowe revised and revisited; Antony Sher shines as a cantankerous actor
Superb: Toby Jones in 'Uncle Vanya' © Johan Persson
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Sarah Hemming YESTERDAYPrint this page0
Uncle Vanya
HAROLD PINTER THEATRE, LONDON
“Everything’s the same as ever, only worse,” grumbles Toby Jones’s Uncle Vanya, early in Ian Rickson’s beautifully executed staging of Chekhov’s great tragicomedy.
It draws a laugh: this grouchy old so-and-so speaks for just about everyone on the stage and probably a great many in the audience. But his complaint also neatly underscores the wider reach of Rickson’s production. Here the characters may be in 1890s Russia, but their inertia and sense of impotence in the face of change feel all too resonant — and, given the play’s environmental awareness, highly charged. There’s a stinging irony to the notion, voiced by visiting doctor Astrov, that a hundred years down the line humanity will have sorted everything out.
Uncle Vanya is a play in which, famously, everyone is both adrift and stuck. The arrival of the pompous professor and his beautiful young wife has halted work on the rural estate, upended normal routines and set the characters brooding on their lot. Hours once occupied by activity stretch out in the heat; reflection prompts the realisation that decades have evaporated. The results are not pretty. “You used to be gorgeous,” the elderly nanny informs Astrov, unceremoniously (Conor McPherson’s colloquially contemporary new adaptation is spikily funny).
Rickson and his creative team pick up on that slippery, elastic sense of time and stretch it further. Rae Smith’s evocative set is a spacious garden room, once grand, now running to dilapidation. Bookcases lurk in the cavernous dark, unconsulted; a piano sits forlornly, unplayed; greenery is forcing its way in through the cracks; nature is fighting back. It’s a dreamlike space and one that feels symbolic. This, and the subtly indeterminate period of the costumes, slips the play from the safety of the past. Its emotional honesty is as funny and painful as ever, but here the sense of lives frittered, wasted or misspent has political weight.
But this is also, on another level, Heartbreak Hotel. Everyone is a casualty of love misdirected or misunderstood and the characters remain all too comically recognisable. We’ve all met Ciarán Hinds’s self-important professor, filling the space where his talent should be with a loud banging ego, blithely destroying other people’s lives with his myopic plans. We’ve met, too, Yelena, his young wife, played here by Rosalind Eleazar as tragically aware of her own mistake but not bold enough to change.
Richard Armitage’s restlessly intelligent Astrov, the rural equivalent of an exhausted hospital doctor battling endemic problems, is drowning out memories with booze.And at the centre of it all are Vanya and his niece Sonya, suddenly aware that, in working the estate to support the professor’s career, they have wasted their lives. They are brilliantly balanced. Jones is superb: ridiculous, loudly self-pitying, sarcastic — and desolate. Aimee Lou Wood’s gently sincere Sonya, meanwhile, is the quiet anchor of the play. It’s she who patches up the doctor with food; she who soothes Vanya with occupation; she who loses most — her unrequited love runs the deepest — and yet she who voices resolve. Among many small revelations, this production makes you see how the “Uncle” of the title reflects the spotlight on to her.
★★★★★