Uncle Vanya
Chekhov’s almost unbearably mournful play of love unrequited and lives flailing and unfulfilled is spectacularly well served in a new touring production from the venerable Peter Hall that also inaugurates a new playhouse west of London, the 900-seat Rose, built to approximate the spatial dimensions of the onetime Elizabethan venue near Bankside that long ago ceased to exist. How wonderful, then, to welcome a new building in the west London suburban community of Kingston while at the same time heralding that truly rare production of the abiding Russian master that for once reveals precisely what he meant by calling his plays, against all expectation, comedies.
Sure, the laughter prompted by this Uncle Vanya often exists a heartbeat away from profound sorrow, and many of the most ruthlessly comic moments arrive at the expense of characters whose own clarity about their deep, diurnal unhappiness is exactly what is funny about it: it’s hard not to look on with a face at once smiling and brimful of tears as Michelle Dockery’s surpassingly pragmatic Yelena, for instance, speaks at the end of the first act of being a very, very unfortunate woman - this from a great beauty whose expressions of distress bring out something approaching elation in Loo Brearley’s abject, contrastingly homely Sonya, niece to the eponymous, lovesick Vanya (Nicholas Le Prevost). To be self-aware in Chekhov’s landscape is merely to be able to articulate better than most exactly how little chance of uplift exists in an environment where people love foolishly, wrongly and unwell and are left at play’s end doing their sums so as not to face up to the subtraction of virtually all satisfaction from their lives: Of all the Vanyas I’ve seen, and there’ ve been a lot, this one ranks up there with Wallace Shawn’s unforgettable film in catching the fully prismatic, quicksilver qualities of this eternally wounding rondelay.
Like Stephen Mulrine’s briskly, brusquely, vivid translation, the acting under Hall’s acute eye is always commendably on the front foot, which is to say at a gratifying remove from the self-consciously languorous, indolent approaches to Chekhov that have become the norm. Nor is there any of the melodramatic excess Trevor Nunn brought last year to The Seagull, a crucial mistake given a dramatist whose characters are self-dramatizing enough as it is. Listen, for instance, to David Ganly’s Telegin - aka Waffles - describe just how it is that he came by a nickname that does him no honor, though the actor is terrific in a supporting role that, again to Hall’s credit, never becomes an unduly showy turn. It’s part of the decidedly modern flavor of this play that most all the characters at one point or another turn to us to italicize a state of being for our benefit that also benefits from the Rose theater layout, which includes cushions at the very front of the auditorium enabling people who’ve paid the least to get some of the best views possible.
The casting is very clever, indeed. There’s nothing preening or vaingloriousness about Dockery’s Yelena, whose apparent lack of interest in her own beauty puts one in mind of those movie stars nowadays - Daniel Day-Lewis, for one - who’ve spent an entire career playing to some extent against their looks. Brearley is an exceedingly sweet Sonya who’s not above seeming a bit silly, as well. The two women have a defining encounter at the start of the second act with Sonya in hilariously mock-hectoring form telling Yelena what to do, minutes before the two are clutching one another as Yelena announces on cue that Sonya has beautiful hair. Situated on an estate whose residence, we’re told, has 26 rooms, Vanya allows all its characters to make whatever bid for attention and affection they can, only then to catch at the human comedy that comes with being rebuffed. Le Prevost’s silver-haired, unexpectedly dashing Vanya, for one, wonders aloud how he’ll live to 60, which is a question worth asking given suicidal tendencies that - very much unlike The Seagull - are destined not to succeed. And the TV name Neil Pearson does the best theater work I’ve seen from him to date as the hapless doctor, Astrov, whose ramblings on the weather elicit nervous laughter accompanied as they are by our awareness of what Astrov doesn’t feel and hence cannot say: that he responds in any real way to the worshipful Sonya, when his attentions are otherwise deflected toward Yelena, young wife to an aging professor in Serebryakov (Ronald Pickup) who in turn talks of becom(ing) repellent even to myself.
The evening is a bracing surprise not least for furthering one’s sense that Hall, now 77, is working more simply and fluidly than he has in years. But coming from a director associated first and always with Shakespeare, this Vanya has the sort of affective range and sweep one associates with the Bard. And let’s face it, if you’re not going to do Shakespeare - and is there much left by now that Hall hasn’t done - who better than the Russian doctor? With Uncle Vanya, Hall takes a play and playwright you may have thought you knew by heart and cracks it open anew, heartache, mirth, and all.