Uncle Vanya

Synopsis

Starring Anna Friel, Ken Stott, Samuel West and Laura Carmichael of Downton Abbey, Uncle Vanya runs at the Vaudeville Theatre from 24 October to 26 January.

Adapted by Christopher Hampton and 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.

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Our Review:

5 November 2012

It's a great shock in Lindsay Posner's revival when Anna Friel starts yawning during Samuel West's impassioned speech about the decimation of the countryside. Admittedly, West eventually admits that he's boring her. But isn't this a misunderstanding on his part?

For if the beautiful Yelena, married disastrously to a bad-tempered old professor, is not falling cataclysmically in love with the ideologically prophetic doctor in this scene, then the rest of the play falls apart.

It doesn't quite do that, but there is a tendency at the Vaudeville to read Christopher Hampton's superb, sardonic translation (not heard on the London stage since he made it for Paul Scofield at the Royal Court in 1970) at face value. In Chekhov, as in life, people quite often mean the opposite of what they are saying.

Scofield and Michael Gambon were both Vanya's age, 47, when they played him. Ken Stott's rumpled estate manager, who looks as though he's slept upside down in a bale ...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 21 December 2012:

Having hated the Young Vic's ridiculously updated high concept Three Sisters it would be churlish to complain about Lindsay Posner's slightly stolid production of Uncle Vanya. It may not move at a great pace but it is perfectly set in period and takes no liberties with Chekhov's text. The story revolves around superbly believable permutations of unrequited love which is both painful and deeply resonant. Ken Stott, who looks oddly like Bilbo Baggins, is a slightly peasant-like Vanya but few actors can better his volcanic emotions and Anna Friel is appropriately beautiful as the unobtainable Yelena - it's intended as a complement to say that she does most of her best acting when not speaking conveying subtle changes of mood as a reaction to others. I wish I had seen the apparrently superior production at the Print Room but at least this is a version of his great play that CHekhove would actually recognise....

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