How do you play Anton Chekhov today? After the liberating unorthodoxy of the Young Vic's Three Sisters, we are back to normal with Lindsay Posner's production of Uncle Vanya. This is a world of samovars, solid furniture and chenille tablecloths. Nothing wrong with that; but the production, boasting a handful of fine performances, left me intermittently moved rather than profoundly stirred.
On the plus side there is Christopher Hampton's version which is limpid, faithful, sharp and which reminds us that Chekhov's characters are forced to confront the painful reality of their existence. When the tetchy professor and his beautiful young wife, Yelena, finally quit the country estate, nothing much seems to have changed but those remaining have acquired a terrible self-knowledge.
Vanya and his niece, Sonya, face a future of loveless drudgery and the visiting doctor, Astrov, is reconciled to a life of bachelor solitude. All they can hope to do is survive: in the touching climactic words of Sonya: "We must just go on living."
That comes across in Posner's production which, in its final moments,all but ruined on the first night by some disturbance in the auditorium, aims for the lamplit quietude of a Vermeer interior. And the best of the performances are in keeping with the spirit of the play.
Samuel West's Astrov is an environmental idealist coarsened by vodka, vanity and lack of any real feeling for other people. There's a wonderful moment when he promises Sonya to forswear drink with a rhetorical flourish that indicates he is lying.
And, in the famous scene where Astrov outlines the deforestation of the countryside to Yelena, West shows that his genuine zeal is inseparable from his passing lust.
Anna Friel also captures the essence of Yelena. Her palpable boredom as Astrov talks about rural ecology is as funny as the frisson she obviously feels when their bodies momentarily touch; yet Friel also conveys Yelena's own self-knowledge as she beats her sides in anguish and confesses to herself: "I'm such a coward." And Paul Freeman as her gouty, irritable husband is full of the rage that comes with knowing that his glory days are done. His cry of "Damn this old age, it's so vile and repulsive" is the play's most intense moment.
That is the key point about Chekhov: the sense of death is accompanied by a rich sense of life. And that is what I find largely missing from Ken Stott's Vanya. He conveys Vanya's self-aware futility but little sense of what might have been. Stott hits two basic notes: rasping anger and tearful self-pity but there is little modulation and not much sense of life's potential.
Stott isn't helped by Posner's production which, during the great scene when Vanya hears the professor's proposal to sell the estate, keeps him rooted to the spot rather than prowling the stage in incoherent desperation.
For the rest, there are some good, reliable performances, notably by Laura Carmichael as Sonya and June Watson as the old nurse. But in the end this is a production that presents the play clearly without shedding much new light on it or achieving the molten intimacy of the best Chekhov productions.
I am not claiming that every Chekhov production has to be experimental; but, after two very good Vanyas already this year and with a purportedly transgressive Russian production to come next week, this one is solidly capable rather than genuinely inspiring.
Until 16 Feb. Box office: 0844 412 4663
