The Print Room follows up a tricky, late work by one of the fathers of modern drama with a classic from one of the other founders. After Mike Poulton’s adaptation of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (called Judgement Day) comes Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Poulton’s fourth version of the play. The auditorium has been transformed from traverse to in-the-round staging, in an intimate, beautifully modulated production by Lucy Bailey that does full justice to this tragicomic masterpiece.
The scenario is typically Chekhovian: a group of Russian landed gentry bemoaning the way their lives have failed to live up to their dreams. For many years, Vanya and his niece Sonya have been working hard to manage the country estate given to her late mother as her dowry, but their stable if tedious routine is threatened when her retired professor father Serebryakov decides to sell up so that he can live in luxury with his young second wife Yelena. Frustrated emotions overflow as Vanya is in love with the beautiful Yelena, as is his friend/rival and doctor/landowner Astrov, who in turn is loved unrequitedly by Sonya.
Chekhov’s elegiac but unsentimental portrait of a gradually dying way of life is full of compassion for his characters’ frustrated potential while also being aware of the absurdity of human foibles. In his crisp translation, Poulton makes sure that the humour as well as the pathos of their predicament comes through. I’ve never laughed so much at a Chekhov play, but ultimately the quiet desperation of the protagonists trapped in prisons of their own making is a moving experience under Bailey’s subtle and sensitive direction.
Designer William Dudley has adorned the white walls with small pictures of domestic scenes emphasising the family history, while the four wooden doorways at the corners and period furniture lend a homely elegance. Richard Howell’s effective lighting ranges from bright summer sunshine to autumnal gloom reflecting the mood of the drama, and Gregory Clarke’s atmospheric sound effects of thunderstorm, church bells, dogs barking and horses cantering set the scene nicely.
The ensemble acting is very fine. Known especially for playing more vigorous and thrusting roles, Iain Glen may not be obvious casting for the lethargic and hapless Vanya but he gives a convincing account of someone who tries to hide a deep-seated, mid-life crisis beneath a dishevelled, clownish exterior. William Houston is equally impressive as the humanitarian Astrov who has lost his ideals but still performs his medical duty, bringing a rugged masculinity to this hard-drinking ladies’ man.
Charlotte Emmerson is an engagingly candid and caring Sonya, guilelessly confessing her feelings to her stepmother Yelena, played with cool detachment by Lucinda Millward, tied down to David Yelland’s deliciously pompous and hypochondriacal professor. And there’s good support from Caroline Blakiston as Vanya’s eccentrically querulous mother, David Shaw-Parker as a bumbling, guitar-playing old retainer and Marlene Sidaway as a maternalistic, devoutly religious nanny who tries to comfort everyone – though it seems life on earth is not destined for happiness.
Read Exeunt’s interview with Iain Glen about finding humour and hope in Chekhov.
