By Anton Chekhov
A new adaptation by Conor McPherson
Directed by Ian Rickson (stage direction) and Ross MacGibbon
Music by Stephen Warbeck
Sonia Friedman Productions
2021
CAST
Roger Allam – Alexander Serebryakov
Richard Armitage – Astrov
Anna Calder-Marshall – Nana
Rosalind Eleazar – Yelena
Toby Jones – Vanya
Deatbhla Molloy – Mariya
Peter Wight- Telegin (‘Waffles’)
Aimee Lou Wood – Sonya
The play opened in London in fateful February 2020 at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London. It did not last long. we had tickets for it and unlike the National Theatre, Watermill and RSC we never got a refund either.
So, stuck as they were, they went back to the Harold Pinter Theatre and filmed it there without an audience, so it’s not filmed theatre as such (an audience makes a major difference). They’re calling it a hybrid film / play. There is a major difference in the use of close-up which is used a great deal, and close-up benefits the emotions of the play.
Roger Allam replaced Ciaron Hinds for the filming – we had wondered how Roger Allam had managed to be at The Bridge Theatre in A Number the same month as the original stage play started, but Ciaron Hinds was on stage as Serebrayakov. By the time they decided to film it, Ciaron Hinds was off doing my very favourite films of the last three years … The Man With The Hat and Belfast. Roger Allam was a definitive Serebrayakov whatever.
Now we have it on Blu-Ray. A Conor McPherson adaptation was a major attraction. We have the David Hare playscript of the adaptation from Bath 2019 – and Hare also did all three adaptations for Chichester’s Young Chekhov season. I’m not sure how they define adaptation … I’d say Alan Ayckbourn’s Dear Uncle re-located to the English Lake District in the 1930s is an adaptation of Uncle Vanya, and these are rather ‘versions.’ Or is Ayckbourn a new play re-using the broad plot?
After watching I checked a few memorable sections in the Hare version, and it didn’t look radically different. I suppose both work from a word-by-word translation from Russian. I sense that this has gone even further along the path of turning monologues into dialogue. Both cut the addresses to audience but the use of close up here renders those as ‘thoughtful asides to camera / thinking aloud’ which is more effective than striding to the front and addressing the hall. That’s an advantage of filming which would not have worked in the aborted stage version.
Plot
We are on a large estate in the Russian countryside. The estate is run by Vanya (Toby Jones) with the help of his niece, Sonya (Aimee Lou Wood). They live with Vanya’s mother, Mariya (Deatbhla Molloy ) and Nana (Anna Calder-Marshall), the family’s childhood nurse. Telegin, nicknamed Waffles (Peter Wight), is an impoverished local landowner, living on their charity. He is necessarily obsequious.
The problem starts when Sonya’s father, Alexander Serebryakov (Roger Allam) decides to move back from Moscow, where he is a famed academic and pamphleteer. He brings his much younger glamorous wife, Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar). Sonya’s mother was Serebrayakov’s first wife, and so Vanya’s sister. Serebrayakov is not a blood relative. He is treated like a minor God, particularly by his mother-in-law Mariya. He is a hypochondriac, which necessitates frequent visits from the doctor, Astrov (Richard Armitage) who lives twenty miles away. Astrov is an old friend of Vanya, and Sonya has loved him from afar for years.
Both Astrov and Vanya are hypnotised by Yelena’s beauty. Serebrayakov is a narcissist and believes he will decide the future of the estate, by selling it to provide a better living for himself … the estate actually belongs to his daughter, Sonya, but he believes he can steamroller Vanya and Sonya’s objections.
The performances are universally excellent. We knew before we watched that Toby Jones would be an edgy powerful Vanya. We’d seen Richard Armitage in The Crucible and expected (and got) a strong handsome Astrov … as Chekhov had qualified as a physician it’s no surprise that Astrov is the heroic role, though cruel in totally failing to see Sonya’s infatuation. Rosalind Eleazar was Yelena, and it was a performance that was riveting, enhanced by seeing her reactions and expressions close-up. Roger Allam’s long centrepiece in Act III when he announces he’s decided they should sell up was one we instantly wanted to watch again. The mood was perfectly captured.
Aimee Lou Wood was the surprise casting … because she made her name in the high school set Sex Education TV series. She is actually around the right age in 2022 (27) … the age Chekhov specified for Yelena, so a daughter the same age as her new stepmother. She plays it right too. In other versions, I’ve seen Sonya as older than Yelena, and embittered by years of yearning. In the text she mentions having had her heart set on Astrov for six years (she would have been 25 when it was filmed) so that also fits. The issue for both of us, as great fans of Sex Education, is that she is heavily imprinted on our minds as the seventeen year old she was playing in that series.
Politics and economics
It stood out here that the financial set-up is feudal. A large estate has peasants in poor conditions (as Astrov points out). The earnings are remitted to an absentee in the big city, Moscow. Serebryakov is a professor and famous academic here, but that’s its own kind of aristocracy … Waffles and Nana address him as ‘Your Excellency.’
Times are changing … Serebryakov wants to switch from feudalism to capitalism, by selling up the estate and placing the proceeds into stocks and shares, thus upping the income from 2% to 4% or 5%.
Russia’s ‘capitalist’ phase was short before it entered what it called ‘socialism’ after 1917 – read Marx. Each era (feudal, capitalist, socialist, communist) was assumed to last centuries before the subsequent phase took over – no major society has ever achieved what Marx imagined would be communist. Chekhov was observing the feudal-capital transition.
Ecology
Yes, this play ticks all the 2022 boxes. It’s near 50/50 gender in the cast (four women / five men). Astrov is deeply concerned at deforestation and contamination of rivers and ponds which he has been mapping. He knows that this is because the peasants live in dire poverty and need winter fuel, and to get it they are destroying their environment. In this version, Conor McPherson is more subtle than David Hare, who had Astrov declaring that it would cause ‘climate change.’ I noted it in the review of the Hare version. It reminds me again of an editor who warned me never to show characters as neatly prescient when setting a story in the past. i.e. Characters are in Liverpool in 1960, and remark, ‘There’s a lot of young talent here. I believe one day kids from this city will have major impact on popular music.’
There is a sad piece of unintentional contemporary reference, when Serebryakov suggests he may have to move to Kharkiv (I use the Ukrainian spelling deliberately) where there’s not much to do. Chekhov was living in Yalta in Ukraine, which is in Crimea. Which is still The Ukraine!
Time frame
Like Oscar Wilde, it’s hard to imagine moving Chekhov far out of the turn-of-the-century time frame (written 1896, published 1898, first performed 1899 … directed by Stanislavski). I’ve seen Wilde plays costumed and set-dressed in the 1920s but that’s about as far as you can go without a radical rewrite. It’s much harder with Chekov because the distant country estate with peasants, 20 miles from a similar neighbour, is very much a Russian thing. You can’t shift it far in time without banging head-on into the 1917 Revolution, and the play won’t work in a post-1917 Russia.
The costume works when you watch it, but in retrospect it’s a hybrid. The men are in sturdy 1900 clothing. The younger women have mid-calf dress lengths, and then later Sonya is in trousers. Yelena needs to look attractive and exude sexuality, and the dress helps, though it’s not only mid calf, but is split at the side. Her white dress is more Regency cleavage than late 19th / early 20th century too. I’ll have to stop nitpicking historical accuracy and admit that Yelena’s costumes enhance her role.
Sonya’s blouse looks a poor fit and home-made, which it would have been. Vanya’s crumpled clothes are what an agricultural supervisor would wear. Willing suspension of disbelief covers it. Karen pointed out that they were very considered elsewhere. At the beginning, Nana is knitting a scarf. At the end Astrov is wearing it. Nana is using garter stitch, she notes, which is what you do when knitting on stage because it takes less concentration.
MY RATING
*****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
Arifa Akbar, The Guardian *****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage *****
The Stage ****
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
UNCLE VANYA
Uncle Vanya (adapted by David Hare), Bath Theatre Royal 2019
CHEKHOV
Young Chekhov Season, Chichester 2015
PLAYS BY CONOR McPHERSON
Girl From The North Country, Old Vic 2017
The Weir, English Touring Theatre, Poole 2017
IAN RICKSON (Director)
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, 2018
Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, London 2011
Mojo by Jez Butterworth, West End
Hamlet, Young Vic, 2011
TOBY JONES
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, 2018
Dad’s Army, 2016 (FILM)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (FILM) (2011)
RICHARD ARMITAGE
The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, Old Vic 2014 (John Proctor)
ROGER ALLAM
A Number, by Caryl Churchill, Bridge Theatre 2020
The Book Thief(film) Narrator / Death
PETER WIGHT
Much Ado About Nothing, Old Vic 2013 (Dogberry)
AIMEE LOU WOOD
Sex Education (Netflix series)
Peter Viney's Blog 
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