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The Theatreguide.London Review
Uncle
Vanya
Harold
Pinter Theatre 2020
This is one of the finest
productions I've ever seen of Uncle Vanya – and, indeed, of any Chekhov
play – and I urge you to see it.
It is not a happy play, but a
deeply involving and moving one. Chekhov shows us a houseful of people who
are all unhappy and guides us to accept that it is nobody's fault.
Unhappiness is just a fact of life – at least of these people's lives –
and the play generates recognition, sympathy and perhaps even acceptance.
Quick summary: Vanya and his
niece Sonya have run the family estate for Sonya's father, a respected
professor, but Vanya begins to realise that the man is both unappreciative
and not really worth all the sacrifices. Meanwhile both Vanya and the
local doctor fall in love with the professor's new young wife, while the
doctor remains blind to Sonya's love for him.
The stage is set for a lot of
disappointment all around, and Chekhov's greatness lies largely in his
ability to make us care about all of them, even those who might otherwise
function as villains and those who are sometimes more than a bit
ridiculous.
When, as sometimes happens,
everyone in a cast is bad, the fault lies with the director. And so when
everyone in a cast is excellent, much of the credit must go to the
director.
Ian Rickson has guided his
actors to fully rounded and thoroughly sympathetic characterisations,
illuminating some of the figures in fresh ways and creating a world that
is thoroughly believable.
Toby Jones has built a career
on playing self-pitying little men and bitterly resentful little men, so
Vanya was almost an inevitable role for him, and he does it full justice.
Vanya suffers several
disappointments in the play, and most of the great actors I've seen in the
role have picked one to be the keynote of his experience – the discovery
that he's wasted his life, his futile love for Yelena, even his total
irrelevance to the universe.
Actor Jones and director
Rickman don't focus on any one cause of Vanya's unhappiness but on the
unhappiness itself. This is a man who is doomed to be unhappy. It is as
much a fact of his life, and as inescapable, as his baldness, and it
defines his entire existence.
Decades ago there was an American comic strip character who walked around with his own personal raincloud over his head, so that he lived in perpetual gloom whatever others around him experienced. That's Jones's Vanya, and as comic as the man occasionally is, we cannot help but be moved by his plight.
And Toby Jones sees and communicates something else about Vanya that too many actors miss. The man has lived with his unhappiness so long that it has become familiar and comfortable, and on some level he actually enjoys complaining.
The other outstanding
performance here is by Aimee Lou Wood as Sonya. Sonya spends much of the
play moping about mooning over the doctor and is given what is too often a
soppy and unconvincing message of blind hope in the play's final speech.
But Wood not only makes her a
believable contemporary young woman, with the speech rhythms (credit to
Conor McPherson's fluid and natural new adaptation) and body language of a
teenager, but also invests her with a strength and good sense that
frequently make her the leader in sorting out the others' emotional
excesses. Her final aria is not pathetic but reassuring – she will survive
and her strength will help the broken Vanya to survive.
Both Rosalind Eleazar's
Yelena and Peter Wight's professor are softer and less culpably
cold-blooded than the characters are often played, and only Richard
Armitage's doctor is a bit of a disappointment.
We need to see what attracts
both Sonya and Yelena to him, and Chekhov gives him the opportunity to
show us, in a scene in which he expresses his enthusiasm over a pet
project and we should sense the sexual energy women would find in such
passion. But Armitage doesn't generate that sexiness and the scene goes by
almost unnoticed, limiting both his characterisation and those of the two
women.
It's a small lapse rather than a crippling one, and practically the only reservation in in an enthusiastic recommendation for this first-rate production.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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