Uncle Vanya
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
“I live among freaks!” a burdened physician says early in this production of Uncle Vanya, directed by Cathal Cleary. It’s a splutteringly funny line from Brian Friel’s adaptation of Chekhov’s 1899 play that is a punch-up of the original. “I am as silly as the rest but not as stupid,” is how it languidly goes in Marian Fell’s path-finding English-language translation.
Mikhail, played by a superb Adam Fergus, is on a routine visit in a remote Russian region where locals raise their eyebrows at him. Outside the drudge of work he devotes precious free time to beekeeping and rescuing forests.
If Friel gives him added pizzazz, the playwright has interpreted Chekhov’s comic devices – the laugh-out-loud entrances and emotional breakdowns of 19th-century melodrama – via the razzmatazz of 1930s screwball comedy.
“Let me tell you how much I love you!” Vanya – a quick-witted Risteárd Cooper, as a shabby labourer nearing 50 – yelps as he chases a member of his extended family whose visit is wreaking havoc in their country estate.
READ MORE
Elena – his brother-in-law’s current wife, played by Maria Oxley Boardman – funnily runs ahead of him: “For God’s sake, Vanya!”
Together they resemble a classic screwball match: an impulsively purehearted thrillseeker and a problematically cautious superficialist. (Elena admits to marrying her husband because of his prestigious lecturing career: “I was mesmerised by the ‘great scholar.’”)
This being Chekhov, poet of unrequited love, people learn the hard way that sometimes others are just not that into you. Eavan Gaffney’s Sonya, a besotted young caretaker of the house, tries to play it cool when sussing out an uninterested Mikhail, but it feels too guarded an approach. What about the gamble of putting yourself out there?
In fact, Cleary’s Smock Alley production, while pleasingly lucid, restrains several of the play’s obvious characterisations: the grotesquerie of Nick Dunning’s Alexander, a self-infatuated lecturer bloated with gout; or Elena’s high-handedness, now curiously downplayed (“You can’t see me striding around the countryside in a sensible skirt and wellingtons, can you?”).
For the cast portraying Chekhov’s hopefuls, it’s a difficult balancing act to play someone lustrous but also depressed. Vanya becomes angrily aware of a lifetime’s ambitions being held back, his gruelling farmwork funding Alexander’s expensive lifestyle in the city (“I have been deceived!” he seethes in Fell’s translation).
In Friel’s version Vanya’s private pain is heard as it would in a Samuel Beckett play, as if the character were an excluded outsider looking in. He hauntedly agonises over Alexander: “That was real life,” he says, lingering on the adjective.
What doesn’t translate in Cleary’s production is that last-chance urgency to transform your life. (Curiously, Uncle Vanya has always resembled a kind of what-if scenario if Chekhov never married his wife. Mikhail, the single thirtysomething physician, is a mirror image of the playwright that surrenders to cynicism.)
“I’m going to endure, and I’ll go on enduring until my life comes to an end,” Sonya says grimly to Vanya, their hopes effectively extinguished.
They needed to be lit first.
Uncle Vanya is at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, December 20th
