Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre
By Anton Chekhov
Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1Y until May 2nd
Reviewed by Jarlath O'Connell
Published on January 27, 2020
www.haroldpintertheatre.co.uk/uncle-vanya

Irish playwright Conor McPherson's work is often dubbed ‘Chekhovian' so you'd think he's a natural for adapting Chekhov's melancholy masterpiece about pitiful, unrequited love and lost hopes, but sadly this much hyped production of Uncle Vanya misses more often than it hits the target.

Uncle Vanya Dearbhla Molloy invests Mariya (Vanya's mother) with some real fire. ©Johan Persson
A few years ago at the Almeida Robert Icke delivered a Vanya which answered (for this writer at least) how you give this play a contemporary spin without destroying its core the psychological detail which, of course, is informed by its historical setting - it's an icon of naturalistic theatre - and how these characters were expected to behave in that society. That repression, that sense of duty, fuelling the sadness and the futility. You update it badly, it ends up like a Californian daytime soap, all empty emoting, everything made explicit.

McPherson's adaptation lays on the vernacular approach with a trowel, as if we couldn't ‘get' people from just 120 years ago. Ian Rickson's direction and Rae Smith's hip design, like some trendily distressed antique laden loft in Shoreditch, adds to this modern take.

Toby Jones, a superlative actor, turns Vanya into a bilious version of Ian Hislop in Have I Got News for You. All smart-ass sarcasm, which of course would come from a place of confidence, not from someone clinically depressed. It makes you wonder why such a vital and seemingly self-aware character would endure his lot - being stuck slaving in a remote country estate so that remittances can be sent to support the Moscow lifestyle of his pompous brother in law, the great Professor. The point about Vanya is that he'll never go ...and he knows it.

Ciaran Hinds, quite miscast, can't help giving the Professor a sinister edge which doesn't sit with someone who runs away at the first sign of being challenged. Richard Armitage has Byronic presence as Astrov but no sense of this being a man with a hinterland, which is what makes him so attractive to the women. He's an oddity in 1899, a man whose passion for environmentalism and vegetarianism now seem astonishingly prescient. Another example of why you don't really need to ‘update' Chekhov.

There are two great things in it. McPherson brings all the women characters to the foreground and in doing so he gives Dearbhla Molloy a chance to invest Mariya (Vanya's mother) with some real fire. Here she berates Vanya for failing to take advantage of his authority as a man, which she never could and it totally illuminates this thwarted woman, usually side lined as a steely intellectual fussing over the great professor's pamphlets and completely absent of any motherly warmth.

Also, Peter Wight takes another minor character, Waffles, the hanger-on, who is usually presented as pitiable and so the ‘comic relief' and transforms him. In a masterclass of acting Wight has him lose his temper and we glimpse the pride underneath all that subjugation. We see what the man had been.

Investing this piece with a forced contemporary spin is a matter of swings and roundabouts and here you lose much more than you gain.

REVIEW: UNCLE VANYA (Harold Pinter Theatre) ★★★★★
January 27, 2020 // By: West End Wilma // Plays, Reviews // Comments are off
Anton Chekhov wrote the play Uncle Vanya in 1895 but this glorious new staging and adaption at the Harold Pinter Theatre by Conor McPherson gives it a timeless feel while still rooted in the decaying country house of Imperial Russia, with a household full of ennui.

The brilliant and highly theatrical staging by Rae Smith, sets the play simultaneously in the faded glory of a twenty six room Russian Dacha and on the stage of a theatre with practical stage doors and a fire extinguisher visible to the rear. The stage right glass doors give a glimpse of the grounds and weather outside where leaves tumble on to the stage as autumn approaches. The huge regal mirror stage left reflects on the odd collection of family members who inhabit this space. It creates a picture perfect setting like some old master’s dusty painting in which the family go about their daily mundane business of eating, drinking, flirting and arguing and occasionally directly address the audience in powerful soliloquies.

The references to the decline and disappearance of the magnificent forest surrounding the house, mapped by the local Doctor and speeches about who will remember them in one hundred years, (but hoping that we will have figured the ecology out), have a biting relevance to today’s audience in this new eco-aware world.

Equally, the suppressed female roles of bored wife and servants and the assumption by the Professor of ownership of property, left to his stay-at-home daughter reminds us of the progress made on sexual equality. The modern language and twentieth century costume choices add to this fluid setting and give a sense that this could be any family gathering of today.

The marvellous cast of eight, under the excellent direction of Ian Rickson, create delightful pictures of relationships in turmoil and suppressed feelings. They use the depth of the stage well, with the Doctor sometimes loitering quietly upstage, listening into the family arguments, or peering through the windows.

Toby Jones is the 47 year old Uncle Vanya, a powerhouse performance of angst, sardonic humour and pent up frustration. His chaotic hair, untucked shirt and edgy delivery portray his character as much as the perfect comic timing and wistful glances. We see him crawling into a cupboard in a drunken state, raging in an outburst of resentment and quietly settling back into the old routine. Each feels real and generates our sympathy for his position.

Opposite him is the Doctor Astrov, played by Richard Armitage, a bristling tense man haunted by the death of a patient on the operating table, drowning his sorrows in alcohol and struggling with unrequited love. They portray two grumpy old men, lost in their world.

Armitage is at his best with Jones and Peter Wright as Telgin, in a hilarious drunken party or explaining his passion for the forest. He quietly accepts being told “you used to be gorgeous” and complains “I don’t feel anything now” and we sense that this is true.

Rosalind Eleazar plays the overpowering Professor’s (Ciaran Hinds) second wife Yelana, a bored seductress who both Vanya and Astrov lust after. Her listless bored lifestyle in the house leaves her open to temptation but her loyalty to her husband seems strong. It is a quietly powerful performance that holds its own against the three men trying to dominant and direct her.

Aimee Lou Wood plays Sonya, the twenty-seven-year-old naive daughter of the Professor, who has been bequeathed the house. Her quiet, subdued, childlike behaviour of the the first act is replaced by a steely determination and acceptance in the second and she too holds her own especially in her final words as they return to “their old ways”. There is also strong support from Anna Calder-Marshall as Nana and Dearbhla Molloy as Mariya.

The adaption, cast and direction, gives this classic tragicomedy an energetic, relevant, modern feel, in which we feel sympathy for the Vanya, Sonya, and Yelana and sadness that though life goes on, nothing changes. As in so many homes, they exist rather than flourish and seem powerless to halt the decay and despite the brilliance of the comedy we are moved by their plight. The only thing that has changed is that we no longer feel like “old codgers” at 47 years and we have many more years of life expectancy to make a practical difference.

Reviewed by Nick Wayne

Theatre critics Matt Wolf and Lyn Gardner join Robert Bound to give their verdict on the new production of Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ at the Harold Pinter Theatre, starring Toby Jones and Ciarán Hinds.

There is much discussion as to whether or not Anton Chekhov’s full-length plays are comedies or tragedies. A new adaptation of Uncle Vanya by the brilliant Conor McPherson, currently playing at The Harold Pinter Theatre, leaves us in no doubt that this particular play can be downright hilarious. Having Toby Jones and his exquisite timing in the title role helps. Plus the fact that Ian Rickson directs. This version of the play about foolish characters living in their own little worlds, to the exclusion of all others, is laugh out loud funny, even if the laughter it elicits is often poignant and deeply felt. McPherson is so adept at stripping back without taking away and this Uncle Vanya is much more accessible than most. Despite the Irishman’s use of contemporary language, Chekhov’s poetry still shines through and the odd swear word and use of slang never grates.

The scene is set right from the start thanks to Rae Smith’s perfectly realised plant encroaching drawing room on a crumbling country estate. The estate has been satisfactorily run by Vanya and his niece Sonya (the excellent Aimee Lou Wood) but the arrival of her father, Professor Serebryakov (Ciaran Hinds) and his beautiful, but restless, new wife, Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar), has upset the apple cart. Vanya resents the professor, who was married to his late sister, and is totally smitten by Yelena. He’s not the only one. Regular visitor, Doctor Astrov (Richard Armitage) has also fallen under her spell, which is particularly upsetting for poor Sonya who is madly in love with him herself. Unfortunately for her, he has no such feelings and there is a heart-breaking moment when he avoids the kiss she tries to deliver. Thus the scene is set for trials and tribulations, exacerbated when Serebryakov announces his intention to sell the estate.

Although the laughter abounds, it’s not at the expense of the various characters’ emotions. Yelena’s discontent and realisation that her marriage to a much older man was a tremendous mistake is keenly felt, thanks to Rosalind Eleazar’s subtle performance. The scene where Serebryakov stops her piano playing is especially well handled. Richard Armitage’s Astrov is suitably self- obsessed, whilst Ciaran Hinds’s ability to portray pomposity is put to full use. Peter Wight, too, who never delivers a mediocre performance is the perfect old retainer Telegin as is Anna Calder-Marshall as Nana.

But, it’s Toby Jones and Aimee Lou Wood who shine brightest. I have to admit, that, apart from the fact that Conor McPherson has done the adaptation, it was the casting of Jones in the title role that prompted me to buy tickets back in September. His lightness of touch and comedic skills make for a totally believable Vanya. Everything that happens to this man suffering an existential crisis is perfectly feasible in his capable hands and he is irritating, pathetic and lovable in equal measure. It’s all done without a bucket load of sentiment, but you totally feel his longing and capability for deep emotions. Likewise, Aimee Lou Wood is so good at portraying a lovelorn young girl and it’s all credit to her that her speech at the end of the play is touching rather than sentimentality over the top.

As you may have gathered, this Uncle Vanya surpasses any others I have seen. If you’re a lover of Chekhov, and even if you’re not, it’s a great night at the theatre.

Posted by Sandypeegee at 15:00

Theatre Review: Uncle Vanya At Harold Pinter Theatre
Uncle Vanya, Harold Pinter Theatre ★★★★☆
BY MIKE C


Conor McPherson’s reworking of this dacha-based melodrama has nicely millennial-ised Chekhov's original, in a way that strips it of unnecessary, audience-alienating ornaments without losing any of its power. There’s a strong ensemble cast but really it’s Toby Jones’s show: in the title role he’s a deadbeat malodorous peasant with a lecherous wink for the ladies and a ready retort for all comers.


That’s not to say the rest of the cast don’t give as good as they get. Particularly strong are Richard Armitage, a handsome younger Astrov, oozing repressed 19th century sexuality, and Aimee Lou Wood (the toothsome teen agony aunt in TV's Sex Education) as a limpid Sonya. Here she’s quavering on the edge of a sexual revolution or more likely realisation that life, unfortunately, goes on. And on.


Her opposite is Rosalind Eleazar, believable as Yelena, the tart with... if not a heart, then certainly guts and a spleen. But it’s Jones who has the measure of this play, owning the stage from the start, whether it’s a trousers falling down gag, or an elaborate routine where he leads Astrov and Waffles (the amiable Peter Wight) in a merry drunken dance in and out of the cupboards shouting at the tops of their voices.


If anything, it’s designer Rae Smith’s lush green set, evoking a lived-in dacha and visualising the entropy of fin-de-siecle Russia, that shares top billing. Detail, depth and a lived-in rustic feel add to both the vitality and smothering sense of stultification that’s at the heart of Vanya: the clash between the energetic city dwellers, ever hungry for novelty, and their country cousins for whom keeping it going is what counts. As the earth burns around us, we may need to decide soon who’s side we’re on. Chekhov certainly knew.

Uncle Vanya, Harold Pinter Theatre, Panton Street, SW1Y 4DN. Tickets £15-£90, until 2 May 2020.

Last Updated 27 January 2020

Laudine hat geschrieben: Und wenn's allen gefiele, dann wäre das ausgesprochen verdächtig und irgendwie auch nicht so, wie Kunst sein sollte.

Uncle Vanya@unclevanyaplay
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"The perfect Chekhov." @guardian


#UncleVanya
http://unclevanyaplay.com

Uncle Vanya – Review
January 27, 2020 by Madeleine Morrow Leave a Comment

Last Updated on January 27, 2020

Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Soho.

For those who know and hold Uncle Vanya close to their hearts, this production at The Harold Pinter Theatre will delight. For those who are seeing the play for the first time, it is a masterful introduction to one of Chekhov’s finest works. Even for those with no interest in Chekhov at all, it is simply a treat to see such fine ensemble acting with Toby Jones in superb form in the leading role.



Uncle Vanya has been adapted by Conor McPherson, a multi-award-winning playwright with a long list of work including The Weir. The script sounds fresh and focuses on contemporary concerns. Along with strong direction from Ian Rickson, the play moves at a good pace even while remaining quite a long production.

Vanya, his mother and niece, Sonya, live with an ageing housekeeper, Nana, on a country estate that was owned by Vanya’s late sister. She died when Sonya was six and Vanya has run the Estate ever since. His brother in law, a retired Professor, Serebryakov, arrives to stay with his young wife Yelena. They can no longer afford to live in the city and the Professor announces his plan to sell the Estate and move to Finland. This will leave Vanya and the three women homeless and their efforts to keep the Estate running for 25 years will have come to nought. Long-held grievances boil over and create the humour and drama of the play.

Chekhov broke with the orthodox tradition of Russian 1800s playwriting and ushered in plays that moved into the interior world of the characters, focusing on conversation and mood rather than action and plot. Uncle Vanya, like all Chekhov’s plays, covers the big themes – the purpose of life, love, loss, mortality and religion. These issues remain of concern to modern audiences which is partly why the plays, like those of Shakespeare, continue to feel contemporary. In removing the references that lock the play into the late 1800s when it was written, McPherson has allowed Uncle Vanya to speak directly to audiences today. An emphasis on ecology – the importance of forests, the dangers of industrialisation destroying the planet’s resources, the fragility of the natural world and the need to preserve natural resources – makes the play feel very modern.

The theme of mental health is also ever-present through discussion about Vanya’s depression, Astrov’s alcohol dependence and symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Professor Serebryakov’s hypochondria and even the madness ushered in by love. Sonya describes sensory hallucinations when separated from Astrov, an attractive local doctor and family friend for whom she has suffered unrequited love for the past six years. The vagaries of love form part of the humour and sadness of the play with each character having loved and lost or loved in vain. There are no happy endings.

Toby Jones is at the top of his game in his portrayal of Uncle Vanya, He is both vain and self-loathing, blaming others for his own inaction, believing he could have been the next Schopenhauer had he not been confined to a provincial backwater where he has wasted his life running the Estate that belonged to his late sister. He is capricious, melancholic, infuriating and infuriated, madly in love with the young wife who has replaced his late sister in marrying his brother-in-law, and yet fully aware he is well out of his league. He is both pompous and self-deprecating, comedic and pathetic. He unravels before our eyes, his mental health deteriorating to suicidal proportions. He is steadied by his niece, the young Sonya who is his late sister’s child and whom he has raised while her father absented himself with his academic life as Professor in Moscow.

Sonya is played by Aimee Lou Wood, a young actor currently starring in Sex Education on Netflix. I initially found it difficult to dissociate her from her role in the television series but as the play progressed her performance matured from slightly shrill ingenue to a heartbroken and thereby maturing young woman who brought the play to a climactic emotional conclusion. During the final scene, Sonya grows increasingly luminous as she attempts to survive her heartbreak with the utmost compassion, heralding the angels she hopes to hear one day when she and Vanya finally pass into the next life.

Rosalind Eleazar, as Yelena, evolved from aloof to sisterly, a wonderful scene between the two young women had them sitting on the floor, gossiping over cheese and wine. Men fell at her feet, unable to resist her beauty and angrily denouncing her as a fox, an octopus, a woman with mermaid’s blood. All the while she represses her own unhappiness in a sterile marriage with the Professor, 40 years her senior. She describes herself as ‘a footnote in the Professor’s life’. As her passion grows for the charismatic Astrov, she allows herself one moment of freedom and it was a relief to see her unleash a more passionate side of her character.


Anna Calder-Marshall was marvellous as Nana, depicting an ageing and wise, loving grandmotherly figure in stark contrast to the real grandmother, Mariya (Dearbhla Molloy,) who played a woman frustrated by her lack of freedom, railing against her son, Vanya, for failing to make use of the agency his gender has afforded him.


Richard Armitage was an impressive Astrov, the doctor who sets the female hearts aflutter. His mental health has taken a beating from his ongoing exposure to typhus epidemics and traumatic deaths. He is burnout, consumed with feelings of guilt and symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. His work as a doctor has deadened his feelings at least until he meets Yelena. He is a passionate man whose love of the forest and nature is compelling and his unusual ideas attractive to Yelena. But this is another love doomed and he faces a future of lonely, alcoholic decline.

Telegin is played with humour by Peter Wright, last seen on stage in Rosmerholm. Professor Serebryakov is played by Ciaran Hinds who portrays his preening pomposity coupled with a measure of vulnerability, growing hypochondria and resignation to his mortality.

The actors are all strong throughout this production of Uncle Vanya. In the first half emotions remain mostly repressed except for Vanya who is emotionally incontinent, his unhappiness dripping with sarcasm and venom. There is plenty of pathos to keep the audience amused. In the second half of the play, cathartic rage and despair threaten to overwhelm the players and emotions rise up and destroy their protective defences of reserve, denial and decorum. The performers at this point are at full throttle, their emotional power is compelling. By the curtain call, both audience and players are wrung out. In his most poignant scene, Astrov declares that ‘we are stuck here, our situation is hopeless’, and expresses the hope that in 100 or 200 years, ‘the people, they will have figured it out’. Those of us sitting in the audience hearing Chekhov’s message 130 years later realise that we have not.



The set, designed by Rae Smith, is an utter delight – a side wall of glass with a forest of trees beyond and an interior that is filled with the dappled light of in the first scenes and the growing darker as the play progresses. The costumes are beautifully toned to blend with the muted shades of the set, the actors donning outfits in greys, blues, and moss green. The entire play takes place in the one space which adds to a feeling of suffocation. The final tableau in a thing of beauty, one of the loveliest stage settings I have seen. In a scene reminiscent of a Grand Master interior, Nana and Telegin sit in the shadows, one knitting and the other softly strumming a guitar. Vanya and Sonya are illuminated partly by candlelight as if painted by Rembrandt.

With Three Sisters on at the National Theatre, Uncle Vanya at The Harold Pinter Theatre, and The Seagull due to open in March, Chekhov fans are literally spoilt for choice in London this season.

REVIEW: Uncle Vanya, Harold Pinter Theatre ✭✭✭✭✭
Mark Ludmon
28th January 2020 Reviews

Mark Ludmon reviews Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya directed by Ian Rickson now playing at the Harold Printer Theatre, London.
Uncle Vanya Harold Pinter Theatre


Uncle Vanya
Harold Pinter Theatre, London
Five stars


Despite its stifling atmosphere of gloom and decay, Uncle Vanya is considered one of Chekhov’s more comic plays. Conor McPherson’s new adaptation at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson, embraces this with an almost farcical tone, making it highly entertaining and accessible but without detracting from the overall mood of despair.

The play’s depiction of “horrible provincial life” is one familiar from Chekhov’s dramas. An extended family lead lives of not-so-quiet desperation on their remote country estate, stuck in a daily routine of diminishing returns. Vanya, the uncle of the estate’s young owner, Sonya, has sunk into dissolution, lurching from sleeping to drinking to ranting bitterly about the pointlessness of their existence. The local doctor Astrov, vulnerable after the loss of a patient, has been sucked into this indolent lifestyle, distracting him from his projects to improve the local environment after years of deforestation. The household is shaken up by the return of Sonya’s father, a high-flying professor, and his glamorous young wife, Yelena, but, as passions run high, it seems nothing can stop the energy-sapping entropy.

First staged in 1898 as unrest was growing ahead of revolution, Uncle Vanya presents a middle-class rural society in “steady irreversible decline”, left behind by 19th-century progress. This is brilliantly reflected in Rae Smith’s design where the dimly lit living room is encroached upon by leafy branches as if the house were already abandoned to the elements. With Bruno Poet’s lighting design playing with shadow and light, it sits like a ghost on a reconstruction of a stripped-back 21st-century stage, with fire doors and ducting clearly visible.

Although still set in late 19th-century Russia, McPherson’s adaptation gives Chekhov’s writing a striking modernity through lucidly vernacular language. Toby Jones is excellent as a tragicomic Vanya, dishevelled and despairing, hopelessly in love with Yelena, played with charm and exasperation by Rosalind Eleazar. With a self-absorbed pomposity, Ciarán Hinds is solidly antagonistic as the truth-telling professor, as deluded and impractical as the rest of the family. Richard Armitage perfectly embodies Astrov’s fervour with a physicality that inevitably attracts both Yelena and Aimee Lou Wood’s Sonya while charting his own steady irreversible decline.

Illuminating the supporting characters, Peter Wight as estate worker Telegin, Anna Calder-Marshall as the aged Nana and Dearbhla Molloy as languid matriarch Mariya complete the strong ensemble. Anyone wondering if we need yet another production of Uncle Vanya can be reassured that this lively adaptation opens up Chekhov’s drama to give it a sharp, modern voice that captures the dark humour of lives crushed by disappointment and frustration.

Running at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, until 2 May 2020.

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya
Muddled thinking mars this production of Chekhov's classic, says John Nathan

Harold Pinter Theatre

Toby Jones in Uncle Vanya
Toby Jones in Uncle Vanya (Picture: Johan Persson)
In 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.

Writing down what I think about theatre I've seen in That London, whether I've been asked to or not.

▼
Tuesday, 28 January 2020
Theatre review: Uncle Vanya

I can never quite decide which, of the plays so bleak even Chekhov didn't try to pass them off as comedies, is the most gut-wrenching: On the one hand Three Sisters spends its three hours relentlessly, unforgivingly tearing every last vestige of hope from its title characters; on the other there's Uncle Vanya, whose meditations on mediocrity and wasted lives get many a knowing, sad laugh of recognition out of its audiences. After a couple of high-profile outings for the former last year, it's the turn of the latter and Ian Rickson's production at the Pinter manages a lot more moments of dark comedy, while still packing a devastating punch. Vanya (Toby Jones) has spent his life managing the country estate that used to belong to his family, but was given away as his sister's dowry when she married a celebrated academic. The sister has long since died, and Vanya and Nana (Anna Calder-Marshall) have pretty much raised her daughter Sonya (Aimee Lou Wood) themselves.

The three of them have ensured the farm has maintained a small but reliable profit over the years, which they've always sent unquestioningly and uncomplainingly to Sonya's illustrious father, Professor Serebriakov.



But now the Professor (Ciarán Hinds) has retired and lost the Moscow flat that came with the job, so he's had to move to the farmhouse with his new, much younger wife Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar.) The couple's arrival has disrupted everyone, as the farm's rigid timetable has gone out of the window so that everyone can tend 24/7 to the Professor's whims and keep to his eccentric hours. Vanya's tragedy comes with the realisation of a bitter irony: He's always known he's chosen an unremarkable life, but was happy to do so in service of a great man - after a hard day's manual labour they even used to make copies of his manuscripts for him. Now it turns out the great man was a nonentity whose work was derivative, impenetrable and unlikely to ever be read in his lifetime, let alone down the ages, and the University pushed him into retirement at the earliest opportunity. Worse still, the nonentity himself has had no such epiphany, and has brought his sense of superiority and absolute entitlement with him.



Conor McPherson’s translation invites us to laugh at the characters even as we identify with them, and Rae Smith’s design goes for something that’s just about period-appropriate for the end of the 19th century while being ever-so-slightly off. It’s there in the costumes but more definably in the set, which is a large sitting room but has the trees and yard encroaching stage right, while stage left it dissolves into what seems to be the stage itself, with a modern fire door. There’s a lot of fourth wall-breaking by Chekhov standards, and even a lurch into the surreal when Vanya disappears into a sideboard. It’s perhaps all a nod to the characters’ constant awareness of living in one tiny moment in time, with the rapidly-diminishing forests of the past on one side of them, and a future more banal than they hope for on the other. Certainly you have to wonder if Chekhov believed his plays would keep being performed as long as they have, what with his characters’ tendency to deal with their sadness by assuring themselves they’re just paving the way, and people a hundred or two hundred years into the future will have finally figured their lives out. Well into the second century since Uncle Vanya’s premiere there’s inevitably a strong audience reaction to these ironic moments.



Feeling especially topical at the moment of course are Chekhov’s prescient concerns about the destruction of the Environment, which find particularly clear expression in this play in the form of the damaged, alcoholic romantic Dr Astrov (Richard Armitage.) The clueless object of Sonya’s unrequited love, he falls instead, like everyone seems to, for Yelena. Outside of the time covered in the story he’s probably the most dynamic character, planting and tending trees to replace the disappearing forest, but while Serebriakov and Yelena are staying he gets drawn into the general torpor and time-wasting; never more obviously than when he’s kept at the farmhouse all day because the Professor called for him then refused to see him, while at a nearby factory the victim of an industrial accident goes without medical attention.



As the low-key local heartthrob full of misdirected passion Armitage is apt casting in a production notable for it; Jones is perfect for Vanya, a character whose mischievous tone disguises a lot of darkness, but only goes to make people dismiss him as insignificant, and Wood is a quietly moving Sonya who builds a gently convincing bond with Calder-Marshall’s Nana, and whose rather startled-looking expression makes her understated take on the big final speech a convincing descent into despair she seems to genuinely believe is hope. Uncle Vanya is never going to be a cheery evening and in many ways this feels a particularly bleak take on the play, but it’s certainly an absorbing, intricately detailed one.

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov in a version by Conor McPherson is booking until the 2nd of May at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

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Superb: Toby Jones in 'Uncle Vanya' © Johan Persson
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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.

★★★★★

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Superb: Toby Jones in 'Uncle Vanya' © Johan Persson
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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.

★★★★★

Uncle Vanya review: Ian Rickson consummately captures Chekhov’s fractured family
★★★★☆

30th January 2020 • Harold Pinter Theatre, London

30.-Toby-Jones-and-Richard-Armitage-in-Uncle-Vanya-c-Johan-Persson.jpg
Toby Jones (Uncle Vanya) and Richard Armitage (Astrov). Photo: Johan Persson
Though written over 100 years ago, Anton Chekhov’s classic play about the external destruction of the environment paralleled alongside the internal collapse of a family could hardly feel more relevant today. In this modernised but faithful version, Conor McPherson’s lucidly accessible script and Ian Rickson’s supremely confident direction crystallise these foreboding portents and melancholic atmosphere, as the impeccable cast’s embodiments of deterioration coalesce into a poignantly bittersweet production.

As the stultifying warm summer heat agitates the family of Uncle Vanya and his imperious brother-in-law Professor Serebryakov on their rural estate, the arrival of the charming doctor Astrov stirs up the deep-seated romantic desires of the professor’s wife Yelena and daughter Sonya. Straining under these illicit passions and Vanya’s pervasive regret, they struggle to validate their sense of worth and happiness.

In a perfect piece of casting, Toby Jones encapsulates the ruffled disgruntlement of Uncle Vanya. His dishevelled hair, creased baggy shirts and frequently furrowed brow suggest a man exasperated by the shortcomings of his tireless work. His strident, nasally voice imbues his embittered quips with extra scorn, showing how his sullenness exacerbates the tensions but also makes him wryly entertaining. He also hints at the vulnerability behind this, his posture sinking under the weight of his barely repressed love for Yelena when he stumbles upon her kissing Astrov.

Rosalind Eleazar glows with a dazzling magnetic energy as Yelena. Her entrance seems to literally brighten the room, radiant in a white gown, shimmering as the idealised object of desire. She smoulders with passion and headstrong self-determination through her crisp tones redolent of Helen McCrory’s Hester in The Deep Blue Sea. Some of her luminous wilfulness is shared by Aimee Lou Wood’s Sonya, her bright eyes wide with optimistic longing and the desperation to secure happiness.

As the disrupter Astrov, Richard Armitage’s gentle, rhythmic cadence and rugged appearance show how his altruistic compassion lapses into potently irresistible passion. He avoids reducing the character to a vapid heartthrob, with his restless energy as he strides around the house and asserts his ominous warnings evidencing his instinctive fear of social and environmental decay. Rae Smith’s set and Bruno Poet’s lighting strikingly actualise his concerns in the arresting design. The dark wood, furniture and brick-walls show the fading grandeur and stagnation of the house, with the trees creeping inside through the windows, while the still, hanging air reflects the stifling atmosphere.

In spite of all these brilliantly composed layers, the production is occasionally hampered by a tragicomic imbalance, as the dry humour of the quarrelling often overrides the despair. Mistakes and misunderstandings are portrayed as humorous blunders, while woeful laments often become amusing complaints, all of which seems to slightly trivialise the anguish of the characters and leave you sometimes emotionally confused. Sonya’s realisation that her hope is preserved by ignorance to the truth about Astrov’s feelings, for example, receives a laugh which seems to miss the vulnerability of her youthful innocence. Clumsy social awkwardness too often downplays the painful missed opportunities which ultimately deny them happiness.

As exciting as new work and radical reinventions may be, there’s a special delight in watching a classic delivered with such consummate, confident refinement. Arriving so early in the year, I hope this heralds subsequent successes, rather than Astrov’s foreshadowing anticipation of later disasters.

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