June 10, 2010
Some might find too many distractions in the beauty of the Merton Fellows Garden and the lingering light of a mild summer evening, or too much promise among all those drink-stained fragments of colourful post-Finals confetti, to find their way into Chekhovian sadness and grief. But this production of Uncle Vanya reminds us of all that Chekhov can offer if we feel disposed to listen.
Chekhov specialises in quiet moments of anguish, in symbol, in a gentle choreography of the group, and in a drama of embarrassment and discomfort where grand gestures fall flat – a theatre ultimately of poetry and pathos laced with dark wit and irony. In this play it is Uncle Vanya himself who embodies much of the wry disillusionment. Weary, embittered and purposeless, no longer motivated to work and increasingly attracted to drink, he spends much of the play extolling his sense of life’s waste. He is supported in this by the doctor Astrov, who works all too hard but feels it amounts to nothing, and meanwhile laments that his emotions have died.
The two men perform their despair on the provincial estate of Professor Serebryokov, an eminent man who has drifted into cantankerous old age despite having a young beautiful wife, Yeliena. She is acutely aware of the sacrifice she has made in marrying this tetchy egotist yet refuses to give in to Vanya’s attempts to seduce her – while the Professor’s daughter Sonia droops with unrequited love for Astrov. This is Chekhov: frustrated desire; lost illusions; an ensemble of melancholy.
This production serves as a solid introduction. The period props and costume give us a glimpse of Chekhov’s naturalism if perhaps missing some opportunity to explore his poetry (‘like a ray of sunlight into a dark well’, says Astrov of his declining life: I would love to see a mise-en-scène that really rose to these images), and a stark black door to one side of the performance space provides a sense of enclosure and even of absurdity although it cannot quite reproduce the suffocation one might imagine the ‘four walls’ of the fin -de-siècle stage to have generated. The players suggest to us the challenging range and blend of tone that Chekhov demands – barbed comedy, genuine unhappiness and perhaps hardest of all, numbness, detachment, ennui.
I felt that something tonight was absent, and this absence somehow provoked me. But on reflection perhaps all that was missing was hope. And that’s Chekhov. Try it and see.
Chekhov specialises in quiet moments of anguish, in symbol, in a gentle choreography of the group, and in a drama of embarrassment and discomfort where grand gestures fall flat – a theatre ultimately of poetry and pathos laced with dark wit and irony. In this play it is Uncle Vanya himself who embodies much of the wry disillusionment. Weary, embittered and purposeless, no longer motivated to work and increasingly attracted to drink, he spends much of the play extolling his sense of life’s waste. He is supported in this by the doctor Astrov, who works all too hard but feels it amounts to nothing, and meanwhile laments that his emotions have died.
The two men perform their despair on the provincial estate of Professor Serebryokov, an eminent man who has drifted into cantankerous old age despite having a young beautiful wife, Yeliena. She is acutely aware of the sacrifice she has made in marrying this tetchy egotist yet refuses to give in to Vanya’s attempts to seduce her – while the Professor’s daughter Sonia droops with unrequited love for Astrov. This is Chekhov: frustrated desire; lost illusions; an ensemble of melancholy.
This production serves as a solid introduction. The period props and costume give us a glimpse of Chekhov’s naturalism if perhaps missing some opportunity to explore his poetry (‘like a ray of sunlight into a dark well’, says Astrov of his declining life: I would love to see a mise-en-scène that really rose to these images), and a stark black door to one side of the performance space provides a sense of enclosure and even of absurdity although it cannot quite reproduce the suffocation one might imagine the ‘four walls’ of the fin -de-siècle stage to have generated. The players suggest to us the challenging range and blend of tone that Chekhov demands – barbed comedy, genuine unhappiness and perhaps hardest of all, numbness, detachment, ennui.
I felt that something tonight was absent, and this absence somehow provoked me. But on reflection perhaps all that was missing was hope. And that’s Chekhov. Try it and see.