A Chekhov mini-season, with another Vanya opening next week in Chichester, kicks off with Lucy Bailey's fine revival of this sublime play. If I withhold greater praise, it is only because the evening occasionally has that frenetic quality you so often find in modern classic revivals.
Mike Poulton's new "version" is not without its excesses. I know no existing translation where Vanya fantasises about the Professor and his young wife making love ("Imagine them! Together …"), nor one where he and the doctor, Astrov, constantly lapse into sendups of peasant speech. As if taking its cue from Poulton, Bailey's production also periodically goes over the top: I couldn't believe that Vanya and Astrov would engage in a manic night-time dance or that the doctor, although only "slightly drunk", would fall off his chair like Norman Wisdom.
But, at its best, the production is very good indeed. Iain Glen's Vanya has the bottled rage and aching frustration of a man who has spent his life slaving away on a country estate to support a professorial brother-in-law he despises: as in all good Chekhov performances, Glen gives you a sense of what might have been. Charlotte Emmerson also wisely makes his niece, Sonya, much more than a homely drudge: she has a capacity for love that makes you feel William Houston's dashing but self-absorbed Astrov must be crazy to reject her. And, even if Lucinda Millward as the professor's wife could be more visibly languorous, there is a peach of a performance from David Yelland as her insufferably tetchy, pompous husband.
With the aid of Gregory Clarke's sound design, filled with bird calls and jingling harness bells, the production recreates the atmosphere of the Russian countryside in a small room in Bayswater; and, for all the periodic crudities of Poulton's version, Chekhov's study in wasted potential reduced me, as usual, to tears.
