Uncle Vanya

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

For Irish audiences, the characters in Anton Chekhov’s dramas, who face miserable fortune with good humour, scuffed spirits and copious drinking, have come to seem like kinsmen. That may be because they have also been given a gentle Irish voice in translations and versions by McGuinness, Murphy and Friel, the last of whom warmed to figures who expect their problems to disappear, “if they talk about them – endlessly.”

Among the successes of Andrew Hilton’s elegant and lively production of Uncle Vanya for Bristol Old Vic is the strong reminder that every nation and every audience can find its own Ruthenian affinity: the tragi-comedy of lives half-lived, loves unrequited and hopeless futures is never lost in translation. Stephen Mulrine’s limpid new version is unswervingly faithful to the play, but told in a distinctly English voice where tragedy is wrapped – but not lost – in cooling ironies. “He upped and died on me,” Paul Currier’s idealistic Astrov says of a recently expired patient, “just when I didn’t need it.”

Such downplayed sentiments are carried through in Simon Armstrong’s captivating performance of Vanya, introduced to us with an aria of exasperation, summing up his brother-in-law’s undistinguished academic career as “25 years pouring water down a sink”. No-one here will ever quite say what they mean, and so real feeling seems to be forever circling the drain. Vanya expresses his love for the Professor’s second wife – Alys Thomas’s coolly detached Yelena – as though it might be a feint; Daisy Douglas’s heart-rending Sonya keeps her affection for Astrov hidden, while missed chances and poor timing amass under the blue skies and churning storm clouds of Harriet de Winton’s affecting design.

Such diffidence and evasion is bittersweet, of course, but when Hilton and Mulrine treat each characters’ monologue as a direct address to the audience, casting us as confidants to their anguish, tension seems to dispel rather than stew their private moments, delivered apologetically and not with the explosive pressure of trapped emotion. This may be the real tragedy of Chekhov’s beautiful, useless people, constantly urged to do some real work but forever idle, expelling their weariness around the samovar.

“Degeneration caused by inertia,” says Astrov of the sad fate of the environment, but it’s clear he is describing the estate’s inhabitants. When Vanya finally does take sudden action, his vigour is contorted into amusing farce, tinged with deep despair. Armstrong’s performance makes depression oddly riveting, just as Hilton’s depiction of social entropy is paradoxically energetic. Yet even as Vanya waves a pistol at the professor, we all know that no one here is going out with a bang.

Until Saturday July 17