Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✭
by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Annie Baker, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Toronto
May 13-September 11, 2016
Astrov: “I have no light in the distance”
Jackie Maxwell’s production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya joins the select list of the very finest productions she has directed during her tenure as Artistic Director at the Shaw Festival. It boasts a dream cast who display the kind of tight-knit ensemble acting for which the Festival is justly famous. The tone, as usual in Chekhov’s major plays, balances on a knife-edge between comedy and tragedy, and Maxwell and her cast maintain this balance perfectly.
The return of Serebryakov and Yelena disrupts the formerly placid life in the country by providing objects of desire for its lovelorn inhabitants. Vanya has fallen in love with Yelena, convinced she cannot be in love with such an aged man as Serebryakov. Serebryakov’s constant illnesses have brought about frequent visits from Dr. Astrov (Patrick McManus), with whom Sonya has fallen in love because he is the only man she has ever met who still has ideals and still believes people can change the world for the better. Unbeknownst to her and to Vanya, however, Astrov has fallen in love with Yelena. Chekhov realizes that this awkward love triangle is comic. Yet, because Vanya, Sonya and Astrov each look on the person they love as their prime reason to live, the insoluble triangle is also tragic.
Every adaptation of Chekhov emphasizes different aspects of his inexhaustibly profound works. Maxwell is using the 2012 adaptation of Vanya by American Annie Baker, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for her play The Flick. Baker’s adaptation focusses on an often neglected aspect of the play – Dr. Astrov’s plans for reforestation of the area whose ecology has been destroyed by peasants unnecessarily chopping down trees for fuel. Astrov would have people use a renewable fuel like peat to warm their houses and would have them build their houses from bricks rather than lumber.
The language Baker gives Astrov is so contemporary that we can’t miss her view that his ideals of conserving resources and preserving natural habitats is far ahead of its time. Both Baker as adaptor and Maxwell as director make Astrov’s depiction of the degradation of the environment the central symbol of the play. All of the main characters complain that they have wasted their lives. Vanya and Sonya have wasted the estate’s income on Serebryakov. At the same time no one except Astrov sees that they are also wasting the resources of the world around them. As Sue LePage’s design makes clear, the house where everyone lives is wooden, a sledge of chopped wood features prominently in the first scenes and people even use thick sections of logs as stools. Waste has thus led to the physical and spiritual degradation of the characters’ world.
It is a major pleasure to see Shaw Festival stalwart Neil Barclay finally have the chance to play one of the great roles in modern drama. He gives a magnificent performance that is as natural as it is multifaceted. Barclay plays him as a jumble of warring contradictions. He loves Yelena but knows it is hopeless. He tries to maintain his dignity but knows he is foolish. The satiric light he turns on others, he also turns on himself. This simmering internal war finally comes to the boil and finds an external outlet when Serebryakov proposes selling the estate. Then Barclay’s Vanya unleashes an attack of anger that is frightening in its savagery that settles into resignation once its violence is spent. Never have I seen Vanya’s slow build up to this explosion so clearly portrayed.
Marla McLean provides a beautiful portrait of Sonya. McLean projects a façade of practicality in Sonya that hides a longing for love that she knows is unrequited. The mixture of contradictory emotions in McLean’s Sonya is not as volatile as that in Vanya but McLean intensity makes us know those emotions are no less deeply felt. McLean delivers Sonya’s great final speech so tenderly that we feel Sonya is willing herself and Vanya to believe the words she is saying.
Astrov may be the most complex character Patrick McManus has played and his work is superb. Unlike all the other characters Astrov is a man of action and ideals, but McManus makes us realizes that Astrov needs constant action and plans for the future to distract him from the same underlying sense of life’s pointlessness that gnaws away at all the other characters.
It is very easy to frame Serebryakov and Yelena as the villains of the play, but does the work a great injustice. Maxwell draws much more nuanced performances from the actors in these roles that I have seen before. David Schurmann’s Serebryakov is clearly a man that has been coddled from his youth onwards, so that it is no surprise that he should be so infantile and self-obsessed. Schurmann shows that Serebryakov’s plan to sell the estate is not malicious but rather the product of his never having to consider anyone’s else feelings but his own. Rather than being a villain, Schurmann’s portrayal makes Serebryakov appear as perhaps the most pathetic of all the characters since he is so out of touch with the people and the real world around him.
Moya O’Connell is absolutely smouldering as Yelena. Clearly frustrated by the foolish marriage she has made to Serebryakov, O’Connell’s Yelena can’t help but exude the sexiness that draws men to her. O’Connell makes Yelena’s refusal to work look less like Yelena’s superficiality than the fear she might discover she has nothing whatever of practical worth to offer people. O’Connell makes Yelena so hesitant and conflicted in giving in to Astrov’s seduction and so repentant afterwards that she appears as much a victim of her circumstances as are all the other characters.
The rest of the characters have all resigned themselves to their fates in a way that comically but sadly is what those characters will have to do to get through life. As the nurse Marina, Sharry Flett contentedly treats all those around her as if they were still children because that is how she sees them and that is how she believes God sees them. As Telegin (known as “Waffles” because of his complexion), Peter Millard plays Vanya's tenant who comically but realistically has resigned himself to the curse of his homeliness, yet, a typically Chekhovian paradox, reveals an inner beauty thorough his gift of music. As Vanya’s mother Donna Belleville is is a living reminder of the family’s mindless adoration for Serebryakov that has brought the family to its present debilitated state.
Jackie Maxwell has beautifully shaped the play using a deep feeling for the natural ebb and flow of Chekhov’s writing. She has directed the play as if it were a four movement symphony featuring themes in counterpoint and themes and variations. She has these build and rise to the thundering climax in Act 3 until they gradually reach an ironic resolution in the quiet coda of Act 4.
For acting and directing of the highest calibre Uncle Vanya is one of the must-sees of the Shaw Festival this year. Maxwell and her actors show an unmatched insight into the nature of the play and the interactions of the characters that in turn will make audiences see the work with new eyes. What especially marks the production from beginning to end is a feeling of warmth, a deep sense of compassion for all the characters, who seek a reason to make their way through the confusing world of life and who, when that reason fails, steel themselves to journey through the darkness. Never have I felt Chekhov so clearly anticipate Beckett and seem so utterly contemporary.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) Moya O’Connell as Yelena and Neil Barclay as Vanya, ©2016 Emily Cooper; Neil Barclay as Vanya and Marla McLean as Sonya (Sharry Flett as Marina in background), ©2016 Emily Cooper; Moya O’Connell as Yelena and David Schurmann as Serebryakov, ©2016 David Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2016-08-08
Uncle Vanya