Uncle Vanya

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.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 2 May 2011

Uncle Vanya says that he has wasted his life without having lived it. The old professor’s young wife reckons she’s so bored she may as well be dead. And the professor himself wakes up thinking that his left leg belongs to someone else.

All the characters in Chekhov’s play are somehow alienated from their own existence, standing outside of themselves. The one exception in Helena Kaut-Howson’s production, which manages to be brittle and enervating at the same time, is Tricia Kelly’s old nurse, who has anyway sublimated her own desires in concern for others.

I can’t imagine a better space in London for Chekhov than the new Arcola: its height, intimacy and authentic atmosphere provide the perfect arena, and Kaut-Howson and her designer Sophie Jump have filled it with slender birch trees, evocative old furniture, sudden bursts of hurdy-gurdy music and distant industrial noise (music by Boleslaw Rawski, sound by Paul Bull).

But Kaut-Howson – who has provided a new versi...

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Latest User Review

Alan Moore - 16 May 2011:

Intimate, heartbreaking and hilarious....

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