Has anyone ever caught Vanya’s mixture of fury and futility this well?
Theatre Uncle Vanya
Harold Pinter Theatre
★★★★★
The quintessential Chekhovian anti-hero, Uncle Vanya is a character that has had Toby Jones’s name written all over it for a while. Jones (son of the late Freddie) has arrived at stardom by specialising in peculiarities, misfits, “little guys”.
Two years ago at the Harold Pinter, he was embittered, truculent, haunted and hunted Stanley in Pinter’s The
Birthday Party. Now, for director Ian Rickson again, he brings similar shades of rumpled, resentful expression to bear on a man who has toiled on a provincial estate on behalf of his academic brother-in-law (Serebryakov) only to hit middle age and obsess that he has been conned out of his share of happiness (and achievement).
Assisted by a nuanced, if occasionally foul-mouthed new version by Conor Mcpherson, again he delivers a bravura performance, even more affecting this time round. That’s partly because all of us can (or will) identify with the anguish of those who don’t feel they’ve got their dues. But also Jones doesn’t put a foot wrong as he gingerly steps around a vast living-room area where everyone is battling deathly ennui. It takes a kind of bravery to be so diffident on stage: Jones rubs his hands awkwardly round his neck, behind his ears, sticks them in his pockets; he squints, sidles here and there, leans for support on tables and chairs.
I’ve seen angrier Vanyas (Roger Allam), more melancholy Vanyas (Simon Russell Beale). I’m not sure I’ve seen any better catch the tragicomic mixture of fury and futility when – reroused to ire at talk of the estate being sold off – Jones’s frantically unhappy nobody runs amok with a gun, then subsides into stunned apathy. You believe he actually wants to kill his perceived nemesis, and see the disgust turn in on itself; it’s ugly stuff.
The handling of the ineffably moving ending is perfectly judged too. The dejected (and amorously rejected) Vanya is joined at the resumption of his desk-work by his (equally unlucky in love) niece Sonya – played throughout with an almost heartbreaking youthful radiance by Aimee Lou Wood (a notable face on the far-different Netflix series Sex Education). She looks tearily upwards, affirming faith in a deity and some kind of heavenly posterity; his sad sidelong glances at her say nothing (and everything) in reply.
Elsewhere, the ensemble is a storehouse of talent, each given their moments. Richard Armitage is the dashing, tree-hugging doctor Astrov, foretelling an eco-crisis (the play, published in 1898, feels like an ignored warning from history); he strips to the waist, heads into a downpour, gets giddily drunk, briefly sheds his cares. No quibbles about the other men too: Ciarán Hinds is imposing as Serebryakov but duly bowed with a sense that he’s dead wood; Peter Wight is nicely agitated as a Falstaffian estate staffer, Telegin.
The women easily match them: Dearbhla Molloy is strikingly severe as Vanya’s mother; Anna Calder-marshall is a knitting, scuttling, wise old bird (Nana); Rosalind Eleazar combines transparent beauty, veiled irritation and veneer-shredding yearning as the professor’s second wife, Yelena.
My only real complaint is that it’s all a bit business as usual. Prince Charles reckons we’ve got just 10 years to fix the climate crisis. Can we really afford another reading of the classic that dwells on its psychic storms instead of bringing home its dire forecast?