Uncle Vanya, Vaudeville, WC2 - review

 
1/3
9 December 2012

Productions of Uncle Vanya have hardly been in short supply this year: this is the third I’ve seen, and a fellow critic tells me that it’s his sixth.

Lindsay Posner’s interpretation has the most starry cast of any of them. But it doesn’t have enough passion or intensity.

This is a respectful, refined take on Chekhov’s classic tragicomedy of wasted lives and wistfulness. Christopher Oram’s heavily timbered set features a samovar and — during the drawn-out scene changes — a projected image of silver birches. In the design, as in Christopher Hampton’s translation, there’s a fidelity to the playwright’s vision. Yet both feel solid rather than superlatively fresh.

In the title role Ken Stott is a picture of frustration. His Vanya is desperately weary, a long-suffering man aware of his life’s emptiness but still possessed of wit and rage.

Stott shows us the quirkiness of Vanya’s inherent contradictions: he is capable of moments of dark self-pity, flashes of incisive thought, pungent sarcasm and bursts of explosiveness.

The most sour expressions are mainly caused by Vanya’s former brother-in-law, a vain professor (played as a tetchy poseur by Paul Freeman) whose success maddens him.

The professor is a pedantic mediocrity, so it’s incongruous that his wife Yelena is so beguiling. Vanya describes the way she fascinates everyone else with her beauty.

It is a role for which Anna Friel seems to be just right: her Yelena is poised, looking fragile and conducting herself with a seductive indolence.

Samuel West’s Astrov, a dapper and hard-working doctor, is certainly under her spell. West nicely conveys Astrov’s complexity. He is a mix of disillusionment and energy; he seems exhausted by the experience of being pulled in different directions, but has enough vigour, idealism and charm to captivate Laura Carmichael’s hopeful, industrious and highly sensitive Sonya. Like Vanya, these two know the effects of thwarted love.

Still, for all the strength of the acting, this is a slow-moving Uncle Vanya. The relationships between the characters don’t feel fully developed.

We sense their inner dramas, but not the aching density of their interactions. The production is polished yet neither deeply affecting nor all that funny, lacking the rhythm, tonal confidence and textural richness of a truly great account of Chekhov.

Until February 16 (0844 412 4663, nimaxtheatres.com)

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