Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 5 March 2016

Chekhov's play has been adapted by the director Robert Icke so that its setting is less obviously Russian (Vanya is 'Uncle Johnnie') and also later than the nineteenth century (there is a telephone, and electric light in the house). It features Paul Rhys as John (Vanya), Jessica Brown Findlay as Sonya, Tobias Menzies as Michael (Astrov, the doctor), and Susan Wooldridge as Maria (John's mother and Sonya's grandmother), with Hilton McRae as Alexander (the professor) and Vanessa Kirby as his second wife Elena, Richard Lumsden as Cartwright (Telyeghin) and Ann Queensberry as the nanny. The production is designed by Hildegard Bechtler.

On a raised platform of wooden boards, with posts at each corner supporting a black roof or canopy, there are a few props, and an old nanny and a visiting doctor. Conversation is desultory, the old woman offering tea and complaining about the disruption to the routines of the household, the doctor absorbed with signs of his slow disintegration into mediocrity. Slowly, the whole platform revolves, while a neighbour and the members of an ill-assorted family appear and disappear. The management of the estate, which normally occupies Sonya and her uncle Johnnie, has lapsed during the visit of Sonya's father and stepmother who seem to have exerted a fatal lassitude simply by being there, city folk ill at ease in the country. But John is attracted to Elena, his brother-in-law's new wife (Sonya's mother was his sister), and this adds to the simmering tensions.

There are, of course, plenty of other cross-purposes and attractions, and acknowledging them proves a painful business, as Sonya realises that her passion for the doctor is not returned, and Elena rejects the attentions of both John and the doctor. The professor's plan to sell the estate in order to finance his retirement in town leads to an explosion of anger and despair from John who feels he has wasted his life supporting the ungrateful professor, but when he resorts to firing a gun he misses his target; his sense of futility is only confirmed by his laughable inability to force the issue.

Somehow these stifling frustrations and occasional outbursts are rendered believable and engrossing, even as people talk about being terminally bored and utterly fail to understand one another. This is due both to Chekhov's genius and to an extremely able cast who, in a mainly downbeat and almost throwaway style, with often long silences and apparently inconsequential chatter, reveal the emptiness and despair of unfulfilled lives. With the departure of the professor and his wife, the nanny assumes that life will return to normal, but the doctor may not visit so often (if he has realised the pain his indifference causes Sonya), and John knows that his heart is breaking. Only Sonya, in the quietly moving closing speech of the play, can look forward to a time of genuine rest, radiantly determined to surmount all the suffering she must endure.

The modern idioms and the absence of the usual Russian names, patronymics and nicknames reminds us forcibly that this play need not be a period piece. The predicaments of the various characters do indeed seem contemporary, and their emotional volatility unnervingly modern rather than quaint or old-fashioned. But there is a price to pay in terms of some plausibility. In particular the role of the nanny looks somewhat adrift, and the presence of Cartwright anomalous, where in the original it is completely realistic that an old retainer would still be pottering about, while hangers-on such as Telyeghin (down on his luck, but once a landowner himself) were a feature of estate life in the Russian countryside of the nineteenth century.

The constantly rotating set was an effective device for putting all these people on display almost as specimens for the audience's attention; they often seemed more vulnerable through not inhabiting a solid house (whether the scene was notionally indoors or out). Unfortunately the four corner posts obstructed the view as the revolve turned, and as they were quite substantial this was a real distraction at critical points. The set also creaked slightly as it turned - inevitable perhaps with so much wood, and doubtless minimised as much as possible, but not entirely eliminated. But it was a brilliant stroke to signal some critically important soliloquies by having the speaker jump off the platform to speak from the stage level while a change of lighting indicated an interior monologue.

The play was given in a full four-act version with three short intervals, rather than adapting it to two halves with a single interval. This made for a longer evening, but it emphasised the original balance of the structure and gave full weight to the different encounters between the characters, and allowed the mood swings and the occasional histrionics room to breathe in a most effective way.