Reviews

The Times


There are those who avoid Chekhov. Put off by some inept parasol-fest or clunky translation, they wish these depressed fin-de-siécle bourgeois Russians would get a life. At one dull Cherry Orchard, a man behind me muttered “Roll on the revolution.”

Such dissidents have simply not struck lucky. Here they will. Without gimmicks and using Michael Frayn’s sinewy version (worked directly from the Russian), Jeremy Herrin’s production is poignant, funny and profound, exploring and honouring regret, disillusion, grief and the traps of self and selflessness. In the hope that first-timers will go, despite the play’s fame I offer no spoilers.

Not difficult, because, defying fictional rules, Chekhov puts the “inciting incident” – a certain announcement – halfway through Act 2. Before that we meet old Professor Serebryakov (Timothy West on chilling form), a parasite on his late wife’s estate. The estate is managed by his daughter Sonya and the dead wife’s brother Vanya, who has lost respect for the Professor and brilliantly skewers scholarship as: “Writing about things clever people knew for ages, and stupid people don’t care about.”

Roger Allam’s Vanya is a marvel, moving between sullen depression and rapier wit, hopelessness and passion: both a Hancock and a Byron. His greatness lies in generous admiration: for his dead sister; once for the Professor; now for the latter’s new wife, Yelena. However badly he behaves, glaring and sulking, like Sonya you yearn to comfort him.

The Professor and Yelena are on a long visit; her beauty smites Vanya and causes Doctor Astrov to call daily. The poor plain Sonya loves Astrov without hope, and is the only one enthused by his poetic eco-sermons about deforestation and the vanishing of wildlife, monasteries and wells.

Alexander Hanson’s intelligently ambiguous Astrov is stricken by the cynicism that is a hazard of the medical profession (Chekhov knew about that). He fools himself that his emotional void can be filled by planting trees for happier generations.

I sense Chekhov-deniers looking for the exit. But stay. Even if the other five-star Vanya now running at the Print Room in London doesn’t  beguile you, try this: the mournful, thoughtful; forest where Peter McKintosh’s slender trees. Leaf-fall and moonlight shimmer through long windows, and Fergus O’Hare’s soundscape of crickets and distant dogs evoke rural melancholy.

Stay, for the moments when high emotion tips into comedy. Astrov storming drunk with his stiff collar flapping, or Dervla Kirwan, unspeakably moving in Sonya’s nun-like dresses, embracing the careless Yelena. Feel the undercurrent of older certainties, as the old nurse dismisses rows with “Geese cackle, then quieten” and the impoverished Telegin (Anthony O’Donnel, a marvel) strums the guitar. Stay, for the oblique lesson that it is better to feel and be unhappy than to shrivel into selfishness.

The Guardian

It was Olivier's legendary production of this play 50 years ago that put the new Chichester theatre on the map, and there are times when Jeremy Herrin's production seems like an act of homage: Peter McKintosh's set matches exactly my memories of Sean Kenny's original. But any sense of piety is punctured by Roger Allam's shattering performance in the title role.

Allam's Vanya is, as Chekhov must have wished, a tragic buffoon. You see from the start the absurdity of a man who has slaved away for an academic brother-in-law he detests: emerging from a drunken slumber, a dazed Allam immediately collides with a door. And the comic aspects of Vanya are captured by the way he tries to hold in his slight paunch or lunges like a spaniel at the beautiful Yelena. But there is also real tragedy in this performance. In the great scene where Vanya rounds on the Professor, Allam almost unconsciously picks the petals off a bouquet of roses to symbolise his wasted life, and stutters helplessly when he cries "I could have been a Dostoevsky." In its interweaving of comedy and despair, this is the best Vanya since Michael Redgrave in 1962.

But Chekhov is a team game and there is a host of good performances. Alexander Hanson invests the ecological doctor, Astrov, with the ideal touch of sexual vanity and bibulous coarseness. Lara Pulver not only captures Yelena's indolent beauty and intoxication with Astrov, but also the deep self-loathing behind her description of herself as "a minor character". And Dervla Kirwan suggests, as all good Sonyas should, the giddy obsession with Astrov that offsets the character's stoical endurance. I could have done without the fiddlers who preface each act, and the sound design is more striking in the concurrent revival at London's Print Room. But this production has the benefit of Michael Frayn's translation, a cast that bats all the way down, and an awareness that Chekhov holds the mirror up to our own aching sense of what might have been.

The Daily Telegraph


By a quirk of spring scheduling, we have two Uncle Vanyas opening within a week of each other – one in London, the other in Chichester, both in studio spaces. The battle of the Vanyas, you could say – except that pitting them against one another is an empty contest: when the productions are this highly achieved, I could happily see three Vanyas on the trot and not feel glutted.

The more you examine the play, provided the translations are good, as they are here (courtesy of Mike Poulton and Michael Frayn), the greater the depth of unbearable feeling it reveals. Chekhov, only 36 when he wrote this, shows us, in TS Eliot’s phrase, “fear in a handful of dust”: one day a middle-aged man wakes with the inconsolable thought that he has wasted his life in duty and drudgery – that thought appears to infect those around him, although they must have been incubating it, too; and after a few hours you’re looking into a plague house of existential torment, where the wind moans outside as much as the characters do within it, starved of sleep, haunted by intimations of inconsequentiality.

It’s Vanya, of course, the bachelor steward of his long-dead sister’s estate, maintained for 25 years on behalf of her first husband – the now retired academic Serebryakov – who feels this most keenly, or at least declares it most vociferously.

If I have to express a personal preference, I’d plump for Roger Allam’s fantastically hangdog portrayal in Jeremy Herrin’s production in Chichester over Iain Glen’s more vituperative, lean-visaged Vanya in Lucy Bailey’s revival. While Glen looks more plausibly as if he has toiled in a provincial backwater, seeing out rough weather and rougher humours – and might even have Russian blood pumping through him – Allam has the edge on the character’s mocking and self-mocking tendencies.

Evening Standard