At 84, Sir Trevor Nunn is making his first try at Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov’s 1899 tragicomedy of turgid work and hopeless love on a failing rural Russian property. Aware of the biggest phases – the one particular person to have run each the Nationwide Theatre and the RSC – Nunn is working in one of many smallest, Richmond’s Orange Tree, though it will be an injustice if this model ends there.
The minimalist house brings one speedy achieve. Frequent references to the characters residing suffocatingly collectively usually appear fanciful in huge auditoria. Chekhov’s status can command, however right here theatregoers nervously tuck their ft in because the eight actors drink, dance, duel and kiss inside touching distance. So rawly genuine are the traces and appears that it feels as if now we have one way or the other tuned right into a late Nineteenth-century Russian TV documentary.
A tangibly oppressive ambiance, with lighting by Johanna City and sound by Max Pappenheim, is outlined by liquids craved (tea, vodka) and undesirable (tears, sweat, rain). At all times alert to bodily and historic element, Nunn right here makes hair, in an period and area in need of salons, virtually a subplot. Solely a bald man – William Chubb because the desiccated tutorial Professor Serebryakov – appears to be like neat, extra hirsute fellows sporting wild spirals that seem self-hacked whereas they had been half-cut. The ladies have lengthy locks both flowing, braided, bunned, netted or scarved.
Different productions have been starrier in particular person roles, however Nunn has drawn an immaculate ensemble. James Lance’s scathing, near-deranged Vanya nonetheless hints on the underlying spirit and intelligence that boredom and booze erode every day. Madeleine Grey makes Sonya’s naive and cheery manner a masks that heartbreakingly fractures. On this play, Chekhov most attracts on his expertise as a health care provider, with plot twists involving gout, despair, alcoholism and morphine. Coutured and costumed to resemble the playwright, the Dr Astrov of Andrew Richardson, who made a blinding skilled stage debut as Sky Masterson within the Bridge’s Guys and Dolls, impresses as a doctor destroying his physique whereas inflaming girls’s.
Educated at drama critic faculty to keep away from open emotion, I used to be at first embarrassed – then vindicated by the response round – at my frequency of eye-wiping throughout the astonishing third act, during which Sonya, who secretly loves Astrov, unwisely commissions Lily Sacofsky’s equally besotted, married Elena to probe the physician’s feelings. That is Chekhov at his most Shakespearean and Nunn combines his deep data of each writers in a late profession triumph.
