It’s a sorry start to the Bath season with this Chekhov rip-off
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath
The Bath Theatre Royal summer season begins with the odd, dismaying spectacle of creative taps running dry in the studio. The title of Christopher Durang’s mysteriously successful Stateside comedy (the 2013 Tony Award-winner for Best New Play, no less) should ring bells, being a list of names purloined from Chekhov’s oeuvre with a quirky add-on (spot the odd one out). Its lumpen formulation should, however, ring alarm bells.
The scenario – initially a one-act play but expanded prior to Broadway, where it was graced by the presence of Sigourney Weaver – is art-meets-arty life whimsy. In a “lovely farmhouse in Bucks County”, Pennsylvania, sit bickering a middle-aged man, Vanya, and his adopted sister, Sonia; they cared for their Chekhov-loving gaga-then-dead professorial parents while their actress sister gallivanted off to fame and fortune.
So far, so almost-uncle Vanya, as rehashed in American terms. The actress – Masha (the Weaver role) – visiting with her exhibitionist actor toy-boy in tow, owns the property, which boasts none other than a cherry orchard, and wants to sell up. Allusions to Chekhov’s other stage-masterpieces are dropped in too. Masha would have loved to play her namesake in Three
Sisters, though she’s mainly cut from the same attention-seeking thespian cloth as Arkadina from The Seagull.
Bringing that play further to mind, there’s an aspiring young actress called Nina who delivers a speech that
borrows its cosmic grandeur from Chekhov; his vision of universal entropy has been given an added dash of climate-change doom – that element being delivered by a prophetic maid called Cassandra that no one listens to.
When TS Eliot drew openly from great works of European literature, he produced The Waste Land; Durang’s brazen act of pilfering results only in a waste of time and effort. There’s a knowingness about the script’s derivative nature that could be mistaken for sophistication, but it adds the insult of flipness to the injury of wanton cut and paste.
Oddly, it’s when the whole thing reaches a zenith of plundering exhaustion – and the toy-boy (Lewis Reeves’s often scantily clad Spike) gets reprimanded by Vanya for barely watching the aforementioned speech – that the evening belatedly rouses itself into originality. In Walter Bobbie’s nicely designed production, Mark Hadfield’s grizzled (gay) Vanya exclaims against the gadget-happy modern world, nostalgic for an analogue age, speaking on behalf of defeated baby-boomers. The rant is funny and touching, but comes too late (and lasts too long) to eclipse the contrivance and exposition-laden ennui elsewhere.
Janie Dee was last seen in Sondheim’s Follies; she’s in a folly here, but gamely makes every effort as the capricious, monstrous Masha – five times married, still dressing as Snow White for a fancy-dress party – to disguise the fact, looking wryly and insolently at all concerned, and oozing brittle superiority. As was the case with everyone else on stage, I felt for her, but never for her character – a problem.
Roll on Rupert Everett as the “real” Vanya in the main house in July.