One of a handful of Chekhov plays against which so many of our finest stage actors have measured themselves over the decades, Uncle Vanya is seemingly an unassailable classic.
Still, you don’t need to subscribe to Soviet ideals of optimistic art to find it a touch bleak. Chekhov chronicles the futility and disappointment typical of many human lives, for which those described here could stand for countless millions.
Although I have seen this play given a lighter, more satirical treatment, it is ultimately only comic in the sense that it is tragic. On the eve of the 20th century, Vanya and his niece Sonya have been struggling for many years to maintain a family country estate.
The tedium of their lives has been relieved only by the reflected glory of Prof Serebryakov, Sonya’s father and former husband of Vanya’s late sister, whose academic career they have financed.
But now, at 53, Vanya sees Serebryakov as a charlatan whose life has been as pointless as everyone else’s. His sense of having thrown his own away is made more acute by his attraction to the professor’s beautiful but idle young wife, Yelena.
Yelena is also the reason why Astrov, the country doctor and pioneering conservationist who wants to restore the local forests, is spending so much time in the household, blithely unaware that Sonya is in love with him.
In this co-production between the Belgrade and Arcola Theatre, Polish-born director Helena Kaut-Howson and actor Jon Strickland, who plays the title role, have prepared a new version from the original Russian.
It is impossible for me to judge how well it has caught the allegedly elusive tone of the original, but played in the intimate space of the 300-space B2 auditorium, with the audience surrounding the stage on three sides, it certainly gives you the feeling of being an eavesdropper at a traumatic family crisis.
This crisis lurches into the realms of black farce when Serebryakov’s breezy proposal to sell off the estate pushes a firearm-wielding Vanya over the edge.
Chekhov’s finely-nuanced dialogue is a great gift to actors and it is very well performed here, particularly by Strickland as Vanya, appalled at the belated clarity with which he sees his barren life, Simon Gegor as the acerbic Astrov.
Geogffrey Whitehead’s Serebryakov is a perfect picture of a man made insensitive to those around him by the cotton wool of his own grandeur.
And then there is Hara Yannas, quietly heroic as the sensible but disregarded Sonya, who sees that the only meaning in life must lie in activity, however delusional her final assertion of faith in a redemptive afterlife.
Until April 23.
Rating * * * *
