“This will not be a complacent, cosy evening out”

Briony Rawle talks to Russell Bolam about his new production of Uncle Vanya

Director Russell Bolam has just opened his new production of Chekhov’s stalwart masterpiece Uncle Vanya at the St James’ Theatre, his third collaboration on a Chekhov play with the talented translator and playwright Anya Reiss. Bolam ‘found’ Chekhov while at the University of Kent, when, in a truly breath-taking incidence of good luck, his usual course director was replaced by Professor Paul Allain, who happened to run a theatre company at the time with the esteemed theatre director Katie Mitchell.

Until Mitchell breathed life into into Ivanov for Bolam and his coursemates during several workshops that she ran with the course, (she was directing the play for The National Theatre at the time), he had found Chekhov, like many people, “quite boring and inert, and just a lot of people moaning. But when we worked with her it was just an extraordinary way into just how profound, active, humane, funny and heart-breaking it is.”

Bolam’s deep understanding of Chekhov allows him to hurdle what many people coming to Chekhov for the first time may find problematic: firstly, Chekhov’s tendency towards opening his plays with grinding expositional dialogue (for example, Olga in Three Sisters opens the play by telling her sister Irina that their father died a year ago that day, as if Irina wouldn’t already be quite perfectly aware of this fact), and secondly, the inert plotlessness of his narratives.

“Saying the exposition is clumsy is unfair,” remarks Bolam when I mention it. Taking my example from Three Sisters, he counters, “it starts with the clock chiming, and it’s an incredibly poignant, sorrowful sort of sound. In our production at the Southwark Playhouse [earlier this year], we started with a silence, where the girls were attempting to displace their feelings through activity, and the clock chiming broke the tension of deliberately not talking about the anniversary.”

Similarly, at the beginning of The Cherry Orchard, where Lopakhin regales the maidservant Dunyasha with rambling and irrelevant information about the people about to arrive and about his own history, Bolam argues, “it’s so psychological – he’s talking about Ranevskaya arriving in order to deal with his nervousness. Actually the exposition at the beginning of the plays is very psychological and incredibly sophisticated, so it’s just about excavating the psychology in the dialogue. I think bad productions often make the exposition feel expositional.”

Bolam is equally keen to dispel the perceived inactivity of the plays: “The genius of his work is that they’re not about things happening, they’re often about things not happening. It preludes Beckett in that sense.”

He says, “I think Chekhov’s material, like Beckett’s, is really difficult to get right, and like with Shakespeare and Beckett there are a lot of bad productions out there, so I guess that’s where that reputation comes from. Also, translations have a huge [his word is emphatically elongated into ‘huuuuge’] amount to do with it – people at school read dated, dusty versions of it."

Bolam is effusive on the subject of Anya Reiss, his three-time-collaborating translator: “She’s extraordinary. What she’s so good at is retaining the essence of the line of dialogue but making it much more sayable – my phrase is ‘unstiltifying’. I’ve worked with [playwright] Philip Ridley a lot, and his phrase is that she ‘sandblasts the play clean.’” Bolam admires the way that Reiss “really wants to serve the play. Sometimes adaptors and translators can be quite self-regarding in trying to be clever and putting their own spin on it. But we try to limit that and make it more about Anton Chekhov rather than Anya Reiss.”

The only element of ‘spin’ that Bolam and Reiss have allowed themselves with this production, it seems, is with the setting – relocating the action from rural 19th century Russia to modern Lincolnshire. “What we’ve hopefully managed to do is find a convincing setting for the play happening today in England. We did a research and development week to find a setting that could ring true for the play, and that also would feel familiar to the ear without a baggage of cultural references. Rural Lincolnshire actually has a strangeness to it, and you don’t associate it with The Archers or anything like that.

“One of the challenges of doing Vanya in a modern setting is looking at why this family in the rural location have deferred their lives for Serebryakov’s lifestyle, working and sending all the money to this man. Class is a bit of a dirty word in this country but one of the big resonances of doing the play now is the idea that class is a self-paralysing phenomenon. So much of Chekhov is trying to diagnose this self-paralysis, asking why these characters don’t grab hold of their lives. It’s really a play for today.”

Bolam hopes that the choice of location will be particularly provocative in situ at the St James’ Theatre. “It’s very far away from Lincolnshire, and some of the big questions that the play raises will be particularly resonant. Vanya is a tried and trusted masterpiece, but hopefully this will not be a complacent, cosy evening out. We want to entertain, but we also want to provoke and ask the big questions, which is what all of the major plays should do.”

Finally, I ask Bolam what advice he could offer to directors approaching Chekhov for the first time. There is a mammoth pause while he seemingly tries to find something more appropriate than his first answer, which turns out to be exceptionally good advice anyway: “You’ve got to love actors to do Chekhov. Chekhov is all about the characters. There’s such a huge subtextual universe beneath the words that you’ve got to relish the challenge of exploring that with actors. Chekhov’s a humanist – arguably the most humane playwright to walk this earth – and his work doesn’t suit direction that’s all about spectacle.”

His second piece of advice is to trust the play. “You can never do a definitive production. Vanya is probably my favourite play, but I might have to do it five times to feel like I’ve fully explored it. You have to trust that that play, filtered through the director’s imagination and the actors’ imaginations, will create something unique, rather than feeling you have to impose something unique onto it. These plays are bottomless and infinite, and you as a director in a room of actors will create something new, but never definitive.”

Uncle Vanya runs at the St James’ Theatre until the 8th November.

Click here for details and booking:

http://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/events/uncle-vanya/

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