HelgaPetson
The days blur together, money is a constant nagging anxiety, drinking kills time and numbs the pain – and every morning the ghastly waking nightmare begins again. Like all great works of art, Chekhov’s sorrowful family drama always confronts us with our own reflection; right now, its depiction of stifling, isolated domestic life and fear of the future feels agonisingly immediate.
Ian Rickson’s production opened in January, its run cut short by lockdown. In August, it was remounted and filmed at the otherwise closed and deserted Harold Pinter Theatre.
(Мне вот это нравится - пролог и эпилог, люблю такие вещи, иногда репетиции интереснее, чем сам спектакль)
A cinematic prologue and epilogue capture the process with delicate melancholy. The cast members arrive at the theatre in the rain, dress in their costumes and wait in the wings. The camera glances across the dully gleaming stage floorboards, the untouched props, the uninhabited set, the empty auditorium. It is eerie, elegiac. After the final bows, smoke from snuffed-out candles drifts into the air, pale and ghostly.
In between, Chekhov’s drama of love, loss and despair is handled with skill and sensitivity by Rickson, master of tone and texture. Conor McPherson’s adaptation has an ease and unobtrusive modernity, and screen director Ross MacGibbon swoops in close on the actors’ faces.
We can see every twitch in the jaw of Richard Armitage’s Doctor Astrov, as he frets over his lost youth, or bites back rage at the hypochondriacal selfishness of Roger Allam’s spoilt, poisonous Serebryakov. There’s rheum and weary wisdom in the eyes of Anna Calder-Marshall’s watchful old retainer, Nana. Radiance drains out of Aimee Lou Wood’s earnest young Sonya, as Astrov tramples her heart with unwitting, careless cruelty.
Above all, we witness the bilious frustration and hopeless yearning of Toby Jones’ Vanya, and the tiny, telltale symptoms of his erotic fascination with Serebryakov’s wife, Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar): the rueful, self-mocking desire to please, the gaze that roams over her body like a caress. His adoration infuriates and smothers her but sometimes, if only out of vanity, boredom or emptiness, she responds to it – an indolent, discontented cat craving strokes.
More discreetly poignant are Peter Wight as lonely, gentle neighbour Telegin, resigned to being the butt of every joke for the sake of being included; and Dearbhla Molloy as Vanya’s mother, a woman long thwarted by inadequate men, all wasted potential and pseudo-intellectual posturing.
What we miss, probably inevitably, is a full sense of the organic theatrical whole: of the way in which live experience and spectacle enhance the wider themes (the rhythms and subtleties of ensemble playing, or the overarching symbolism of the crumbling house, foliage snaking through its cracks).
It takes a while, too, to adjust to the echoey acoustic. But Rickson’s production is piercingly close to perfection. And mournful though it is, there’s priceless comfort in that
www.thestage.co.uk/long-reviews/uncle-vanya-fil...
Ian Rickson’s production opened in January, its run cut short by lockdown. In August, it was remounted and filmed at the otherwise closed and deserted Harold Pinter Theatre.
(Мне вот это нравится - пролог и эпилог, люблю такие вещи, иногда репетиции интереснее, чем сам спектакль)
A cinematic prologue and epilogue capture the process with delicate melancholy. The cast members arrive at the theatre in the rain, dress in their costumes and wait in the wings. The camera glances across the dully gleaming stage floorboards, the untouched props, the uninhabited set, the empty auditorium. It is eerie, elegiac. After the final bows, smoke from snuffed-out candles drifts into the air, pale and ghostly.
In between, Chekhov’s drama of love, loss and despair is handled with skill and sensitivity by Rickson, master of tone and texture. Conor McPherson’s adaptation has an ease and unobtrusive modernity, and screen director Ross MacGibbon swoops in close on the actors’ faces.
We can see every twitch in the jaw of Richard Armitage’s Doctor Astrov, as he frets over his lost youth, or bites back rage at the hypochondriacal selfishness of Roger Allam’s spoilt, poisonous Serebryakov. There’s rheum and weary wisdom in the eyes of Anna Calder-Marshall’s watchful old retainer, Nana. Radiance drains out of Aimee Lou Wood’s earnest young Sonya, as Astrov tramples her heart with unwitting, careless cruelty.
Above all, we witness the bilious frustration and hopeless yearning of Toby Jones’ Vanya, and the tiny, telltale symptoms of his erotic fascination with Serebryakov’s wife, Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar): the rueful, self-mocking desire to please, the gaze that roams over her body like a caress. His adoration infuriates and smothers her but sometimes, if only out of vanity, boredom or emptiness, she responds to it – an indolent, discontented cat craving strokes.
More discreetly poignant are Peter Wight as lonely, gentle neighbour Telegin, resigned to being the butt of every joke for the sake of being included; and Dearbhla Molloy as Vanya’s mother, a woman long thwarted by inadequate men, all wasted potential and pseudo-intellectual posturing.
What we miss, probably inevitably, is a full sense of the organic theatrical whole: of the way in which live experience and spectacle enhance the wider themes (the rhythms and subtleties of ensemble playing, or the overarching symbolism of the crumbling house, foliage snaking through its cracks).
It takes a while, too, to adjust to the echoey acoustic. But Rickson’s production is piercingly close to perfection. And mournful though it is, there’s priceless comfort in that
www.thestage.co.uk/long-reviews/uncle-vanya-fil...