Uncle Vanya

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

"Yes, I do think you're attractive. Very attractive. Can we shake hands?" Such is the peculiar brand of passion in Brian Friel's version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, where hearts would run riot were they not so firmly shackled to responsibility, where hope springs occasional. The Lyric Theatre's lucid new production of Friel's 1998 play replicates such exquisite longing in its staging, treating it not as a sumptuous costume drama but as a sparing workshop staging in contemporary dress.

If that sounds ascetic, director Mick Gordon instead offers a study in tamped-down emotions that always seem ready to burst. Igor Vasiljev’s set, making minimal pastoral suggestions through a clever series of frames, may seem as cool and stately as an art gallery, but as they each take to a line of white chairs the performers are driven by tightly coiled feeling. Just look at the way they sit; Declan Conlon’s languid, charismatic doctor Astrov stretching out insolently, Conleth Hill’s sensitive Vanya hugging himself with self-consciousness and Orla Fizgerald as the aloof Elena maintaining the angular poise of someone expecting their portrait to be painted.

Friel’s play recognises a kinship between Russian and Irish expression, where pain is readily transmuted into laughter, but here he nudges the tone closer to Beckett’s tragicomedy of hopeless endurance. “The sun’s trying to come out,” observes Elena. “As if things weren’t bad enough,” replies Ciaran McIntyre’s amiably guileless Telegin.

Gordon allows those echoes without labouring them, investing his attention instead in the nuance of performance. Vanya, for 25 years the manager of his brother-in-law’s estate, is a model of dreams deferred and Hill plays him with combination of aching sensitivity and boyish enthusiasm, declaring his unrequited love for Elena, the professor’s wife, with his hands in his pockets.

The contradictory impulses of love, arousing action and inertia, is also where the play’s politics reside. As Sonya, Siobhán McSweeney confides her desire for Astrov to Elena in a blurted rhapsody that’s both comic and moving, but she is otherwise dumbstruck, just as Conlon artfully shows Astrov’s ecological ideals smothered by his yearning for Elena – or vodka.

“The future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation for them,” Friel wrote of his fascination for such characters, and the ache of the play is for people without purpose, shorn of possibility, but who carry on.

For all his restraint, Gordon allows the third act to tip into farcical excess – it’s enough to watch Hill drink a vase of flower water to suggest the absurd thrust of his rage rather than having Fitzgerald cling to his back when he reappears in a violent rage.

But if that is the crescendo, the resigned mood of the play’s coda lingers with great effect. “I am so unhappy,” Hill tells McSweeney softly. Though she counsels the stoicism of endurance and the promise of eventual peace, at least now he has experienced enough to know the difference.

Until March 11