Uncle Vanya review – Toby Jones triumphs in perfect Chekhov
Last year, David Hare teamed up with Rupert Everett to stage an Uncle Vanya that drew much humour from out of the gloom. Everett claimed Chekhov wrote it as a comedy and played his buffoonish Vanya for laughs. What does Conor McPherson bring to this new adaptation? A different kind of laughter, it turns out: deeper, more poignant and perfectly weighted.
Ian Rickson’s exquisite production is full of energy despite the play’s prevailing ennui. It does not radically reinvent or revolutionise Chekov’s 19th-century story. It returns us to the great, mournful spirit of Chekhov’s tale about unrequited love, ageing and disappointment in middle-age, while giving it a sleeker, modern beat.
McPherson’s script has a stripped, vivid simplicity which quickens the pace of the drama, and despite its contemporary language – Vanya swears and uses such terms as “wanging on” – it does not grate or take away from the melancholic poetry.
Rae Smith’s set is a thing of beauty which raises the theme of environmental damage visually rather than having the modern-day resonances spelled out more crudely in the script. This sitting room contains all the faded grandeur of the household. Garden foliage climbs into the room through the open door and windows, as if nature were reaching into this manmade space, serving as a subtle visual backdrop to the climate message.
Richard Armitage, as Dr Astrov, speaks of his love of nature and the dangers of deforestation, but he does so with an ardour that is metabolised fully into character. Toby Jones’s Vanya is a vaguely dissolute type in sunglasses whose shirt is always untucked. He is variously ridiculous, self-pitying, and made to look a fool by his unrequited passion for Professor Serebryakov’s young wife, Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar). But Jones brings a tortured truth to the role that renders him eminently likeable, even in these moments, and he never fails to move us.
His rages against the pomposity of the professor and his academic achievements have a tone that suggest he secretly hates his own failure. “I could have been another Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky,” he says, and it is both funny in its echoes of Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” and a middle-aged moment of reckoning filled with nostalgia and pathos.
Armitage plays Astrov as a romantic idealist while Eleazar emanates the indolent boredom of Yelena, but shows what lies beneath in a sudden, volcanic eruption of passion with Astrov. Aimee Lou Wood is a goofy but lovable Sonya, also in love with Astrov, and painfully aware of her limitations. Every character is fully realised, including the ancillary roles that bring more than comic relief.
“God will smile on us,” says Sonya, as the household steps back from the brink of despair at the end, and it is the perfectly bittersweet ending to a perfect tragicomedy.
At the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 2 May.
