The Stage

Vanya

Published Thursday 3 September 2009 at 16:05 by Jason Best

Sam Holcroft’s reworking of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is far less experimental than some of the radical deconstructions of the classics put on at the Gate recently, yet her pared-down version of the play works on its own terms as a claustrophobic chamber drama while casting new light on the original.

Holcroft reduces the cast to four - the melancholy Vanya (Robert Goodale), his put-upon niece Sonya (Fiona Button), her beautiful stepmother Yelena (Susie Trayling) and handsome visiting doctor Astrov (Simon Wilson). The ailing professor, Sonya’s father and Yelena’s husband, is a vividly felt offstage presence.

By limiting the number of characters, Holcroft loses Chekhov’s polyphony, but her focus on this quartet intensifies the impression that we are watching people trapped by missed opportunities and impossible yearnings. Director Natalie Abrahami calls them “four characters damned to an eternity of thwarted love”, suggesting surprising affinities with Beckett and Sartre.

Tom Scutt’s striking set, which resembles a giant packing crate, amplifies the play’s sense of entrapment and claustrophobia. As this wooden box revolves, panels are dismantled or folded back to frame the action in different ways, their visual variety skilfully exploited by Abrahami’s direction.

The prevailing mood is one of airless despair, yet there is humour and sensuality too. When Wilson’s Astrov teaches Trayling’s Yelena how to administer morphine to her husband, getting her to practice by injecting a needle full of saline into his own arm, it is a powerfully erotic scene of mutual seduction. Elsewhere, Button gives Sonya a puppyish eagerness that is often comic, while Goodale’s Vanya frequently cuts an absurd figure. Both never lose our sympathy, however. For all her departures from the original, Holcroft shares Chekhov’s understanding that their characters can be both comic and serious, trivial and tragic.