Synopsis Set on a crumbling country estate, Uncle Vanya is the tale of two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere, and a flirtation that brings disaster. The irascible Vanya and his niece Sonya have managed the estate on behalf of their relative, a renowned Professor for the last twenty-five years. Now retired, the Professor and his beautiful young wife come to visit, throwing the household into disarray, igniting hidden passions and old grudges. Family ties are tested further when the ageing and gout-ridden Professor announces his plans to sell the estate and live off the proceeds in the city. By turns comic, tragic, romantic, and wistful, Chekhov's play is an unforgettable study of unfulfilled dreams and unrequited love. One of his four great masterpieces written on the eve of the twentieth century, it features a feast of subtle comic portraits of a family at logger heads with each other and the world around them, that still has resonance at the start of another new century.
The Print Room has rapidly established itself as an essential fringe venue in an atmospheric converted warehouse in Westbourne Grove, and its first classic, Uncle Vanya, thrives on a “one-room” intimacy; Lucy Bailey’s production is the best close-up Chekhov since Katie Mitchell’s version of the same play at the Young Vic.
What’s often lost among all the lassitude and grumpiness is the rawness of Chekhov’s characters: the uneasiness of the patronising professor in the countryside; the awkwardness of Yelena, his young wife, with her enslaved new step-daughter, Sonya; the thwarted sexuality and overwhelming exhaustion of Vanya himself.
Staged “in the square” -- as in a more spacious Orange Tree, perhaps -- there’s no escaping the scrawny fleshiness of Iain Glen’s magnificently intemperate Vanya, just as there’s no escape for him. And William Houston’s physically overpowering Astrov, looming like a big brown bear from one of his own threatened forests, is just as vivid a creature.
[W@S_IMG]#http://whatsonstage.com/images/UncleVanya_IainGlen_LucindaMillward_360.jpg#360#240#Iain Glen & Lucinda Millward in Uncle Vanya. Photo credit: Sheila Burnett[/W@S_IMG]Astrov confronts the “tree problem” with an urge to conserve, while Vanya, says Yelena, is congenitally destructive. In the midst of this uneasiness, exacerbated by Yelena’s languorous beauty, Vanya’s mother (Caroline Blakiston) sits around like a bejewelled aristocratic remnant, old “Waffles” (David Shaw-Parker) strums a guitar and tries to keep the peace, while the professor (David Yelland), a tetchily hilarious hypochondriac with no social skills, upsets everyone.
The eddies and rhythms in their banter between meals and bed-time are much funnier than usual in Mike Poulton’s revised “version” of a script he first prepared at Chichester in 1996, though it’s a bit odd to hear Astrov declare to Yelena: “Here I am, on a plate, eat me.”
Designer William Dudley rings the scene changes with furnishing and decorative panels in the wooden doorways, and the surrounding white-washed walls are covered with family photographs. Sound designer Gregory Clarke provides splendid cacophonous effects of bells, thunder, country noises and dogs barking; at one point, I thought I heard Blakiston cry, “Petersburg!”
The result is a beguiling, fresh and energetic Chekhov, with Lucinda Millward less impervious than usual to Astrov’s magnetic charms, and Charlotte Emmerson’s wonderful Sonya keeping the show on the road with her big heart, scrubbed beauty and innate goodness.
My abiding memory, though, will be of two great, growling performances from Glen and Houston, a couple of top notch, hairy actors who don’t mess around and who play Chekhov vigorously and superbly, without kid gloves. The evening’s a tear-stained delight.
This is a claustrophic, intense and excellent production of Uncle Vanya, staged in the round vivaciously so that noone should feel cheated by sightlines. Despite my reservations that Iain Glen is simply too much of an alpha male to be Vanya, too charismatic to be cowing to David Yelland certainly, his expression of dashed expectations and the loss of all hope was harrowing. He is helped by the fact that William Houston's Astrov is a silverback gorilla of a man, pounding (and heavy breathing) his uber-alpha male frame around the set, with a deep raspy voice that evoked the sturdiness of Barry White. Such a man, you can accept, could get the better of Glen in a love rivalry. And these excellent actors are surrounded by a flawless ensemble, the all-round competence of which is only rivalled by that of the Old Red Lion's Mercury Fur. Indeed, Charlotte Emmerson's Sonya is exquisitely touching in her expression of unrequited love, forthrightness and a compassionate heart. The most remarkable moment in this play, for me, was when David Yelland delivered his life-changing speech, in the second half, to the entire assembled ensemble. He does it in such a sanctimonious, self-regarding, pernickety way to the bewildered gathering that it had me in hysterics, and then Glen's Vanya erupts and his sadness overwhelms everything with brutal heartbreaking vigour. Wonderful! - steveatplays
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