The Stage

Uncle Vanya

Published Thursday 29 March 2007 at 10:50 by Richard Edmonds

Uncle Vanya presents a serious challenge, which this production directed laboriously by Rachel Kavanaugh, does not completely overcome.

The eponymous hero, Vanya himself, is a man who has spent his life supporting his intellectual brother-in-law, only to discover, in late middle-age, that he has wasted his life on a greedy, self-centred old fraud whose opinions are worthless.

Most of the company have been encouraged to bawl out their lines until sections of the play on the Rep’s over-sized stage resemble a shouting match - subtlety goes out of the window.

But human incompetence, which is the underlying tragedy of the play, needs no seismic rendering to underline its force here. In Chekhov, as Kavanaugh knows very well, an indolent strut, a glance suddenly cooled, music played while someone weeps in misery, have a dramatic effect which can touch our souls implying an arsenal of gestures which must amplify and extend Chekhov’s lines, here extended and amplified in no particular way by Bryony Lavery, who seems to have brought a leaden touch to her brief.

Lose these fragile things and significance hurries from the stage very quickly.

John Ramm’s red-faced, noisy Vanya, torn between assertiveness and self criticism, manages to show a man foundering on the rocks of life, a predicament not lost upon Jill Halfpenny’s bustling Sonya.

Yet the final moments when Vanya and Sonya, abandoned on the failing estate, defy impending tragedy together, failed to find the deep tragedy Derek Jacobi once discovered in the name part.

Possibly the most convincing actor on stage was Christopher Godwin’s Serebryakov - a beautifully-shaped performance which brought a much-needed richness to the proceedings.

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