Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
Adapted by David Hare
Directed by Rupert Everett
Set design by Charles Quiggin
Bath Theatre Royal
Wednesday 31st July 2019
CAST
Rupert Everett – Uncle Vanya, brother of Alexander’s first wife, who runs the estate
Katherine Parkinson – Sonya, his niece. Daughter of Alexander
Michael Byrne – Alexander Serebryakov, a famous academic.
Marty Cruikshank – Maria, widowed mother of Vanya and Alexander’s first wife, so Sonya’s grandmother
John Light – Dr Astrov
Ann Mitchell – Marina, the old nanny
Clemence Poesy – Yelena, age 27. Alexander’s new wife
John Standing – Telyegin, aka “Waffles” a bankrupt landowner and dependent
This one seems odd. It’s just a two week run at Bath, yet stars Rupert Everett who also directs, with Katherine Parkinson, whose role in Home, i’m Darling was a runaway hit last year and earlier this. It’s Everett’s first stage director role. The new adaptation is by David Hare … the third David Hare work we’ve seen in a month, with Peter Gynt at The National and Plenty at Chichester. After the Young Chekhov trilogy, David Hare is a natural for a new Chekhov version, though modern versions by Brian Friele and Michael Frayne are available. It is, inevitably, yet another one of Michael Billington’s 101 Greatest Plays. Producers are working through the list.
Not only is it a short run, but press night is Tuesday 30th and it ends on Saturday 3rd August. There’s no sign of a tour or West End run … at least not yet. It seems a huge time investment for two weeks. Apparently press night was pushed back a week after John Light was injured on the first preview. It seems so late as to be hardly worthwhile, especially as it looked full. The play text is on sale at the theatre, listing this as the first production. But programmes aren’t on sale. With five shows left to go, they’ve run out and give you a free photocopy, That’s poor planning, though on our Wednesday matinee every seat was taken in the first half. But not in the second half when there were a few gaps. My companion seriously considered being a second half gap.
Briefly, Vanya and his niece Sonya run a large country estate. It belonged to Vanya’s sister who was Sonya’s mother. She married a professor and writer, Alexander, then died. They remit all the profits to Alexander, the famous academic and hypochondriac, and so he is Sonya’s father. Alexander has recently returned to the estate because Moscow is too expensive, bringing his new young and beautiful wife, Yelena. Both Vanya and the doctor, Dr Astrov, fall for Yelena. But poor Sonya has been carrying a torch for the doctor for years. Alexander wants to get rid of the estate (ignoring everyone who lives there, such as Vanya and Sonya) to finance his retirement.
Everybody fancies Yelena. Clemence Poesy as Yelena, Rupert Everett as Vanya
I’ve never been one for Russian landowners, depressed on remote and gloomy country estates, with no one to talk to except drunken neighbours from twenty miles away. i.e. Chekhov. Our first recall on emerging from the theatre was Katherine Parkinson in the sublime IT Crowd episode, Smoking On The Job, with headscarf and moustachioed companion (looking remarkably like Everett’s Vanya). ‘Every time I want a cigarette I have to go to Gorky Park!‘ she complains. They trek ever further in search of an accredited smoking area outside the office. It’s a marvellous piss-take on Russian drama.
The IT Crowd, Series 2, Episode 3, Smoking On The Job (2 minute video link)
Ah, that reminds me. It opens with Rupert Everett coming on behind a front gauze curtain, and taking a piss. A magic moment … a woman in the audience to the side immediately got up and went to the Ladies. It can have that psychological effect. He looks great – he’s wearing Cossack garb in contrast to the rest of the family in suits.
Rupert Everett as Uncle Vanya
David Hare has cut it admirably in his adaptation – it ran to two hours including interval. He says in the play text that much monologue was moved into dialogue, though nevertheless it was dialogue with long speeches before anyone else intervened, and still felt “stiff” to me. There are also somewhat jarring anachronisms in trying to make it sound modern, whilst still setting it in late 19th century Russia. Vanya says of Alexander:
VANYA: And now he’s retired into utter obscurity, after doing nothing but preventing someone cleverer than himself taking his job. For a quarter of a century he’s been a sort of artistic bed-blocker.
It’s a brilliant comparison … but would a non-British audience member understand “bed blocking” (where elderly people can’t be discharged from hospital, so take up beds needed for emergencies). Then we know that Dr Astrov is an ecologist, and the play covers a time when the land was being despoiled by the demands of a rising population and new agricultural methods. But aren’t drying up rivers and lakes recent Russian history? And would he really have noted climate change?
ASTROV: There are fewer and fewer forests, fewer and fewer rivers, wild animals are becoming extinct, the climate is changing …
That one looks forced in. Some modernisms are fun. Just before he finally leaves, Dr Astrov declines the offer of tea. Then vodka is offered and he replies Now you say!
I quote some reviews below. I notice that one thought Rupert Everett stole the show, and one I read immediately afterwards thought Katherine Parkinson did. She is the central character, as after all Vanya is only “Uncle” to her. In the Mail, Luke Jones complained about her ‘flat, monotone.’ It was only there at times, and when it was, it indicated depression. It works. As ever she was great.
Clemence Posy as Yelena, Katherine Parkinson as Sonya
Katherine Parkinson was indeed as good as we expected. She was walking a little awkwardly to suggest she was a little older. An insurmountable issue is that Sonya is supposed to be “plain” compared to the “young, beautiful” Yelena, now her stepmother. The actors are both very attractive women, and I’m sure no one has thought of Katherine Parkinson as plain in her life. There are only four years between Katherine Parkinson and Clemence Poesy in real life, but that’s fine with the text. It is a great female role and recognized as such which must have drawn Katherine to do it.
I thought Michael Byrne particularly good as the autistic hypochondriac Alexander, about to sell the whole estate to invest in the stock market, totally oblivious to the fact that it’s home to Vanya, Sonya and the rest. He reminded me strongly of John Gielgud as Charles Ryder’s father in Brideshead Revisited.
John Light as Dr Astrov
John Light had had a bad time with injuries, and as Dr Astrov was walking with a standard hospital modern metal crutch. Now, with knee operations on both knees in six months I’ve had a lot of time with just such a crutch then with a walking stick. The physio tells you, ‘You can switch to a walking stick now.’ I can see that John Light is certainly “ready for a walking stick now” and you could walk up the road in Bath and get a plain wooden one in ten minutes (those shoe and key places sell them), though a nice antique would fit the doctor better, and Bath has plenty of antique shops. His performance has been generally praised, and I agree, but next to Everett and Parkinson, he needs to up his voice projection several notches as does Clemence Poesy.
It’s hard to direct and play the lead. You can’t see the whole from mid-stage. Olivier did it. Branagh does it, but Branagh is also a highly experienced director of films and plays which he doesn’t appear in. In the Branagh season in 2016, he had Rob Ashford and then Sean Foley direct when he was playing the lead. There were some dubious touches here, mainly the idea of having some entrances and exits through and around the stalls. It’d work in some theatres, but not in Bath. For starters you can’t see the stalls from most of upstairs, secondly it’s a very tight space and curved with no central aisle. It looks awkward and sounds awkward. As they’d set Acts 2 and 3 outdoors, it wasn’t necessary. There’s no more proscenium theatre than Bath. Live with that.
I recently noted the murky sound further back in the Royal Circle where you’re under the main balcony above you … we used to sit in the front row where it was excellent, but there’s just not enough leg room. The sound wasn’t helped by cicadas and an awful lot of background thunder. Three of the cast … Rupert Everett, Katherine Parkinson and Michael Byrne were noticeably louder and clearer than the rest. In future we’ll book in the stalls. Of course that should have been discovered by listening to rehearsals from every area of the theatre (which you can’t do if you’re acting), then checking again on the first few nights when it’s full, as human bodies change the sound – it is something we’ve seen directors do every time at the Wanamaker Playhouse. In the Daily Mail review (published the day before the run ends, Luke Jones says:
Michael Byrne as the windbag professor, whose only note in rehearsal seemed to be “ensure you’re heard in the cheap seats.”
Daily Mail, 2 August 2019
Well, we do know that critics are not placed in the cheaper seats, but as we were (though not the cheapest), I very much wish that the same note had been given to the rest of the cast. It’s called projection. You’re supposed to have it. Acting 101. All praise to Michael Byrne.
Act IV is interior again. Katherine Parkinson as Sonya, Rupert Everett as Vanya
It’s a good looking production, with some fine actors. I’m a great David Hare fan, but I found the text wooden and stiff several times. In spite of (or even because of) being so heavily cut, I didn’t feel the sense of flow and pace a play should have. Like The Stage review, “subdued” comes to mind. The whole didn’t leap across that fourth wall and grab me. I’m on three stars, my companion on two.
***
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:
Yesterday, reading the reviews as they came through on my phone, one attributed the play to Ibsen. (All Northern forest stuff). I’m not 100% sure who the culprit was (only about 95%) but it’s been corrected overnight!
4 star
Arif Akbar, Guardian ****
Katherine Parkinson steers brilliantly between humour and torment as Vanya’s plain niece, Sonya, and is winningly dorky around Astrov, for whom she harbours a passion. Her shift to pathos, when her love is not returned, is done with pitch perfection.
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ****
It doesn’t help that Everett is sporting a heavy moustache that makes him look like a cross between Maxim Gorky and Basily Fawlty. He should perhaps have a word with the director. Oh, that’s none other than himself. He’s fighting an artistic war on two fronts, then – but he mostly emerges victorious. The rural atmosphere is rather trowelled on: you can hardly hear the words for the cicadas.
Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Sunday Times ****
(August 4th, the day after it finished under “What to See”)
3 star
Anne Treneman, The Times ***
Tantalising set- shame about the production.
Luke Jones, Daily Mail, ***
It’s an evening of good company, cutting arguments and Hare-smart turns of phrase. But with this wattage of cast I would have expected something a bit more memorable.
Daisy Bowie-Sell, What’s On Stage ***
It’s called Uncle Vanya, yes, but here it should really be called Niece Sonya, as Katherine Parkinson steals the show somewhat, alongside the very excellent John Light as doctor Astrov. Parkinson is a tired but hopeful Sonya, full of sweet charm and no malice at all. It makes the breaking of her heart all the more sad to watch.
Natasha Tripney The Stage ***
Unfortunately, (this) playfulness rarely resurfaces in a subdued production shot through with that peculiar English-Russianness that characterises so many stagings of Chekhov in the UK. Part of the problem is David Hare’s condensed, ambiguity-resistant adaptation. The relationships have little room to build and develop, and the same is true of the sense of place and stasis. The emotional implications are diluted. The quietly devastating moment when Yelena is denied the opportunity to play her beloved piano barely registers.
Claire Allfree, Metro News ***
David Hare’s swift and robust adaptation, meanwhile, cleverly presses home the idea that the characters’ inability to somehow act is, on some level, also ours.
Kerrie Nicholson, Broadway World ***
Everett also directs, and for the most part shows a deft, light touch. Hare’s adaptation is witty, but intermittently throughout the humour seems to dull the drama – especially during the pivotal moment in the second act where Vanya unleashes his frustrations, with potentially devastating consequences. The difficulty also comes in pacing. Hare’s adaptation is clear and swift, but such clarity leaves characters and their relationships feeling underdeveloped, despite the sense that Everett’s direction gives his cast plenty of space to play and interpret.
Not using rating systems:
Stephen Dalton, Hollywood Reporter
Charles Quiggin pull off a neat 180-degree reversal of viewpoint midway through, replacing a vine-draped courtyard with a majestic video backdrop of undulating steppes and wide-open sky. Such painterly touches lend this subdued production a much-needed frisson of visual poetry, but not enough to save it from inexorably sliding into the same kind of depressive slump as its protagonists.
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
CHEKHOV PLAYS
Uncle Vanya (adapted by David Hare), Bath Theatre Royal 2019
Uncle Vanya (adapted by Conor McPherson), Harold Pinter Theatre 2020, blu-ray 2022
Young Chekhov Season, Chichester 2015
DAVID HARE
Racing Demon, Bath 2017
Skylight West End
Plenty, Chichester 2019
Peter Gynt, National Theatre, 2019
Platonov Chichester 2015
Ivanov Chichester 2015
The Seagull Chichester 2015
RUPERT EVERETT
Amadeus, Chichester 2014
Wild Target (FILM)
KATHERINE PARKINSON
Home, I’m Darling, by Laura Wade, National Theatre 2018
MARTY CRUIKSHANK
Hamlet, Almeida 2017
JOHN STANDING
Amadeus, Chichester 2014