|
Uncle Vanya
The production of Uncle Vanya at the Donmar
Warehouse is as ideal a presentation of Chekhov’s masterpiece
as we shall ever see. It is brilliantly acted by an ensemble
company, led by Simon Russell Beale, and sensitively directed by
Sam Mendes, illuminating every shade of meaning in Brian Friel’s
fine adaptation. In Anthony Ward’s minimalist set, all the
action takes place around a long wooden table and ten chairs, thus
directing all the audience’s attention to the expert acting.
Each of the six major characters on the Serebryakov country estate
in 1899 Russia is frustrated and disappointed, living among what
one of them describes as “these petty squabbles, these corroding
jealousies, these small domestic hatreds that eat away at our lives.”
Yet the characters of this tragicomedy are individuals, so compassionately
observed by Chekhov that they are universal. We identify and
sympathize with them even as we laugh at and pity them.
Simon Russell Beale catches every nuance of Vanya,
47 years old, fat and rumpled, a born loser who falls passionately
in love with his professor-brother’s young wife.  Despite
the fact that he receives no encouragement from the cool Yelena,
Vanya pursues her, groveling at her feet and declaring his love,
even when she tells him that they have just one thing in common:
“We are both dreary, uninteresting people.” Helen McCrory
is convincingly magnetic not only as the languorous center of attention,
but, even more challenging, she reveals the desperation beneath
the cold exterior. She signals this in telling movements,
like returning the embrace of Astrov after a sexually charged
scene in which the two stalk each other. Having been dazzled by
the professor and his reputation for academic brilliance, she is
now disillusioned with their marriage and with their forced move
to the estate now that he is retired and on a pension.
Their arrival at the estate is the catalyst
that brings self-recognition and ensuing despair. Helped by his
niece Sonya, Vanya has been drudging away his life working on the
estate to provide an income for his brother Alexander to maintain
an exalted academic position in town, living in style with second
wife Yelena. The tall grass growing above the set suggests the underground
existence Vanya alludes to, berating Alexander: “For twenty-five
years we’ve been buried here like moles, Mother and Sonya and I,
working for you….And everything he said, everything he wrote, we
believed, we knew that it was an utterance of genius; and our little
moles’ eyes gleamed with wonder and reverence and unqualified delight.”
Vanya now bitterly realizes that
his brother is a charlatan for whom he and Sonya ruined their lives:
“Worked like a slave for him….And now we
know it was all a shell. A life-time of chicanery – spurious,
fraudulent, empty….Oh my God, what a fool I’ve been.”  As
Vanya, Simon Russell Beale confirms that he is one of Britain’s
greatest actors. Hamlet-like (he recently played that role),
he can be witty one minute, despairing the next, and mad or playing
mad the next. His mother (Selina Cadell) ignores him, saving
her praise for Alexander. In an outburst to her, Vanya laments
a lost career and a youth misspent in drudgery: – “Maybe your son
would have been a Schopenhauer, Mother – a Dostoyevsky, maybe.
I am desperate, Mother.” Her reply is, “Just do whatever Alexander
proposes.”
What Alexander selfishly proposes is that they
sell the estate, at which Vanya explodes. Beale’s anger is
fiery, but disciplined, as Vanya rushes at his brother with a gun.
Typically, he misses - twice.
As the virile country doctor Astrov, an early
environmentalist displaying his maps of forestland needing preservation,
Mark Strong reveals idealism coupled with cynicism, aware that Yelena
is indifferent. Chekhov, a doctor himself, was aware of the plight
of the overworked country practitioners. To the comforting old housekeeper
Marina, well portrayed by Cherry Morris, Astrov complains, “Doctor
Atrophied, that’s me.” He tells of his visit to a village
during a typhus epidemic: “I’d never seen squalor like that ever
before: hovels filled with smoke – filth – the stench of decay –
those low voices asking patiently for help – children dying on bare
floors and pigs and sheep walking across them. I did what
I could. Worked non-stop through the day…” The
passage is illustrative of Brian Friel’s vivid dialogue, and of
the desirability of having a playwright render Chekhov’s text for
the stage. (David Hare has adapted “Platonov” and Michael
Frayn “The Cherry Orchard.”)
David Bradley brings to the role of the
posturing professor Alexander Serebryakov all of the ego and histrionics
associated with this character, but he also creates sympathy for
the older man who has lived at the top for so long and now finds
himself at the bottom, reduced to living on his former wife’s estate.
Complaining to Yelena, he recalls his earlier life of privilege:
“Mental stimulation, intellectual excitement; publications, success,
fame. And I relished every second of it. And this is where
it all ends up, on a broken-down estate….My life is over, Yelena,
and I didn’t experience any of it. It –it eluded me….And I’m
frightened of dying….Terrified.”
The professor’s daughter Sonya perhaps elicits
most of the audience’s sympathy, because the others have made their
choices. Sonya is a victim of fate. Her mother, Alexander’s
first wife, died when Sonya was a child. (Marina calls her an “orphan,”
because of her absent father.) Sonya works with Vanya in a dreary
routine of bookkeeping, bill paying, and meeting the daily emergencies
of farm life, like the hay mowers who may not appear if it rains
and ruins the crop. In a heartwarming performance, Emily Watson
combines Sonya’s strength and faith with her school-girlish,
unrequited love for Dr. Astrov. She is wary of Yelena, and
justly so, for that young woman’s agreement to speak to the doctor
in Sonya’s behalf turns into her own love match with him. Of the
principal characters, Sonya is the only one who does not bemoan
her fate, but realistically accepts it. Her final speech,
comforting Vanya , assuring him that they can and will endure, to
receive their reward in the next life, is one of the most beautiful
passages in Chekhov, and Ms.Watson delivers it beautifully.
Three
Sisters
The National Theater Three Sisters is the second
production of the Chekhov classic to arrive in the West End within
a few months. The first starred Kristen Scott Thomas as a somewhat
cold Masha, a role to which Eve Best brings
more warmth at the National. With Katie Mitchell’s subtle
direction that weaves many varied strands of character and emotion
into an impressive, cohesive whole, this is the preferred of the
two productions. Although Ms. Scott Thomas’s star quality
cannot be denied, in a way it worked against that production, because
a Chekhov play demands an ensemble effort, down to the smallest
character part. As directed by Ms. Mitchell, the opening scene begins
joyfully, with the nameday party for Irina (Anna Maxwell Martin),
with band music and an improvised stage. Here girlish Irina performs
a mock ballet of the dying swan, foretelling the tragic end, where,
in her grief she stumbles out madly into the pouring rain.
To suggest the sister’s escape from the present by dwelling
upon their happy past and hoped-for future, Ms. Mitchell freezes
the action, like the photograph one of the guests takes at Irina’s
party, enlarged on a screen, and then changing from sepia to black
as the clock ticks away the time. Lorraine Ashbourne conveys the
fatigue of the oldest sister, Olga, while Lucy Whybrow is is appropriately
mean-spirited as the vulgar sister-in-law who takes over the domain.
The director carefully develops all the characters.to take their
places in the whole picture. Masha’s schoolteacher husband
Kulygin as played by Angus Wright is less stuffy than usual, more
human, though we can see why she prefers Colonel Vershinin as impressively
played by Ben Daniels. Not only is the Colonel more attractive,
but also his congeniality in company and warm ardor with her is
an appealing contrast to her husband. Ms. Best wonderfully conveys
Masha’s range of emotions, ending with her despair in the
final scene where, soaked with rain, she collapses to the ground.
Ms. Martin brings conviction to the role of Irina, from her joy
at the opening to her final, tragic scene, and all of the minor
parts are well played, especially Patrick Godfrey’s Cvhebutykin
and Tim McMullan’s Solyony, creating the ensemble a Chekhov
play requires. The translation by Nicholas Wright impresses as comfortably
and unobtrusively fitting the characters. Performance schedule:
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
The
Seagull
Outstanding in a long list of must-see revivals
is the National Theatre’s production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,”
directed by Katie Mitchell, with Juliet  Stevenson
impressive as the vain, selfish actress Arkadina, a fading star
who has little use for family and friends except as audience to
her center-stage performance. Martin
Crimp’s new adaptation sharpens dialogue, cuts wordiness, and clarifies
secondary characters. With
a large cast giving a beautifully attenuated ensemble performance,
it’s a production Chekhov enthusiasts can admire, even if familiar
utterances are absent, though one must wonder why Mr. Crimp changes
the dialogue at the very end. Here the report of the suicide is
now shouted at the assembled group instead of whispered as an aside
to spare Arkadina.
Changing the period to the early 20th
century from the late nineteenth creates the subtle implication
that the revolution has changed nothing at ailing Sorin’s rundown
country estate. This is evident in the set created by designer
Vicki Mortimer, an appropriately drafty, vast dining room, its cracked
plaster crumbling and its furniture sparse, plus a lakeside terrace
where Konstantin’s play is staged.
Despite the revolution, the loyal servants have stayed on,
evidently their preference being to “rather bear the ills we have/
Than fly to others that we know not of.”
As the principals dance the tango, bicker, and complain,
the servants quietly feed and clothe them – when not breaking in
on an assignation or a seduction.
Ben Whishaw, last seen on the stage as an outstanding
adolescent Hamlet, is again outstanding, here a moody, Hamlet-like
Konstantin, as he and Arkadina at the outset exchange lines from
Shakespeare’s play, and his resentment of his mother’s lover Trigorin
mirrors Hamlet’s against Gertrude.
Mark Bazeley is the successful writer Trigorin, who turns
observations into grist for his popular fiction mill, in one real-life
case with near-tragic results. When Konstantin shoots and makes a present of
a sea gull to girlfriend Nina (Hattie Morahan), she compares herself
to the seagull, but to Trigorin, it suggests a short story: a man
comes to a lake and destroys a young girl who lives there. This
foreshadows his relationship with Nina. It is a mark of director
Mitchell’s attention to detail that one of the records played on
the wind-up victrola is of Mozart’s Don Giovanni’s seduction aria
to young Zerlina, whom he later abandons.
Ms. Mitchell
says the seagull symbolizes “destroyed dreams,” as can be seen to
good effect in the action: Sorin,
in a touching performance by Gawn Grainger, laments from his wheelchair
that nothing he hoped for in his long lifetime was achieved, only
the opposite. Sandy McDade’s
restive Masha is excellent as she explains
that she wears black because she is “in mourning for my life” and
then, exchanges unrequited love for marriage to another, to prolong
her unhappy state. Angus
Wright is equally effective as the understanding doctor Dorn, to
whom everyone confesses, and who is the exception in appreciating
Konstantin’s avant garde play.
Nina’s qualities
as an actress can hardly be judged from Konstantin’s play, which
she performs in a whisper, wearing underwear with an electric light
on her back, accompanied by weird piano tones.
And her literary judgment might be questioned, as, mostly
offstage, she worships Trigorin and his writing, fervently agrees
to an assignation, bears his child, who dies, and carries on as
an actress. When she returns and, sodden with rain, encounters Konstantin, she
still rejects him, leading to his final, desperate act. (Lyttelton Theatre, tickets and performance
schedule: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
)
|
