Uncle Vanya, St James Theatre
- emilylouisehardy
- Oct 15, 2014
- 2 min read
By Briony Rawle
Anya Reiss continues her spring-clean of Chekhov this month, dusting off Uncle Vanya to follow her sprucings-up of The Seagull and Three Sisters. Her three-time-collaborating director, Russell Bolam, brings some wonderful performances out of his actors in this production of her new text, and although it feels safer and more spacious in the comfort of the St James Theatre than the two previous shows, both at the Southwark Playhouse, Bolam still manages to convey a palpable sense of the play’s bubbling inertia.
The space onstage is used particularly well, allowing great symbolic distance between characters, and an interesting physical dialect of thrashing, writhing, and wriggling that speaks eloquently of the characters’ stultification. John Hannah uses this device to particular effect, and his charmingly honest, grumpy but fiercely loving Vanya sometimes resembles a bored five-year-old as he squirms around the stage looking for stimulation or someone to play with.
His relationship with his niece Sonya, played admirably by Amanda Hale, is a deep and affectionate partnership, and Hale’s Sonya is heart-breaking in her fidgety, self-conscious vulnerability. Although at first it is hard to understand what her pragmatic Sonya would see in Joe Dixon’s over-theatrical Astrov, her struggle to recover from his rejection amid the drama of the play’s climax, and her determined resumption of work and hope, are extremely moving.
Hale’s Sonya does a great service for Rebecca Night’s Yelena, bringing her out of her slightly smug-seeming defensiveness at the beginning of the play, and opening her up with Sonya’s irresistible sincerity into a warm confidante. Jack Shepherd is brilliantly aggravating as the ailing professor, oblivious to all the tension and unhappiness that he brings to the house. Alan Francis’ Telygin (nicknamed ‘Waffles’ for his loquaciousness in the original, but strangely mute in this adaptation), is underused, reduced merely to Vanya’s punching bag and a device to cover transitions, but despite this, Francis gives a good a sense of what his character might be if he were given the opportunity to express it.
The prevailing sensation that the production creates is one of frustrated activity. From the anti-climax of Yelena’s abortive guitar rendition, to the crushingly inevitability of Sonya’s romantic disappointment, even to Vanya’s missed gunshot (aimed so closely at Serebryakov that one might actually think that this time he couldn’t miss), the production painfully presses home the play’s character, as a catalogue of stoppered potential and scuppered hopes.
Uncle Vanya runs at the St James Theatre until 8th November.
@postscriptjour
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