Vanya

Synopsis

Two men love the same woman. Two women love the same man. Vanya is a study of the febrile and passionate inner lives of the four main protagonists in Chekhov’s tragicomedy. Sam Holcroft’s new play explores an inner world of high emotion, memory and missed opportunity which goes beyond despair and longing to reveal two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 3 September 2009

Although promising new writer Sam Holcroft says her play is “inspired” by Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, it strikes me as a forensic exploration of its themes and, altogether, a fine new version that doesn’t diminish or kowtow unduly to the original.

Natalie Abrahami’s production is similar to the kind of imaginative skimming of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy you often find in the Eastern European theatre, and it seems a genuinely fresh way of approaching the piece by focusing right down on the altercations in the play between Vanya and the doctor Astrov, Vanya’s niece Sonya and the sensual catalyst of emotional turmoil, the unseen professor’s new young wife Yelena.

This is not a translation, nor a new version, but a re-imagined, totally re-written distillation, with a wonderful sense of dead-at-night-despair, disastrous eavesdropping, sexual discussion of pheromones and evolution – Astrov tells Sonya that only a propensity for ...

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Latest User Review

Hamish McT - 4 September 2009:

I saw this tonight. It't not Chekhov, but it is astonishing. The set is quite superb: it is startling and weirdly magical to have a revolve in such a small space, and the lighting and design and sound all work phenomenally together to make for a stunning theatrical experience. I loved it. The actors are also all superb, and there are much more laughs then I was expecting. ...

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