Advertisement

Uncle Vanya, Harold Pinter Theatre/online, review: Chekhov’s gem, Covid’s grim echoes

Roger Allam has joined the original, reunited cast of Uncle Vanya for this filmed staging - Johan Persson
Roger Allam has joined the original, reunited cast of Uncle Vanya for this filmed staging - Johan Persson

“September already. How are we going to live through a whole winter here?” So despairs Yelena, young, beautiful and wrongly married to an aged, retired professor who has brought her to his country estate, run by his brother-in-law (Vanya), to idle long days tending to his hypochondria.

Autumn, with the nights drawing in, seems the perfect moment for a cinema airing of Ian Rickson’s superb staging of Chekhov’s masterpiece of regret and unrequited love – which ran in the West End last winter, until Covid struck, and should help get us through another drear season.

How so? Because stating the hardness of life (especially with Chekhov’s lightness of touch, freshly rendered for modern ears here by Conor McPherson) can alleviate it.

Producer Sonia Friedman’s salvage project, reuniting the cast (with one substitution – the ever-excellent Roger Allam stepping into Ciaran Hinds’s shoes to play the querulous, demanding academic), emphasises an absence: the ongoing playhouse closures. But it affirms a spirit of resilience. Without sentimentality, yet with inevitable poignancy, the piece – filmed by Ross MacGibbon – is framed as a coming-together in an empty theatre. At the start, in slow motion, we see the actors arrive alone, checking in through the stage-door. At the end, instead of taking their bows, we see them embracing and bidding adieu, the crew tending to equipment, members of the cast reaching to snuff out candles.

So it marks the moment we’re in – closer suddenly to that late 19th century world of unavoidable mortality, grinding ennui and needed companionship. The surprise though is that without a live, present-tense audience, what we lose in, say, laughter and auditorium atmosphere, we gain in freedom from the specific context of 2020. It now matters less to me than it did in January that the play’s strong environmental themes aren’t given the kind of emphasis that the recent rampaging discussions about climate change near-demanded. Instead, the play’s timelessness hits home.

The painstaking camerawork catches all the detail and nuance – we see every worry-line of Toby Jones’s pensive, rumpled and finally raging Vanya, a middle-aged might-have-been whose face clouds with sorrow when his niece Sonya baldly informs him – “You have yet to see happiness”. The latter is played to perfection by Aimee Lou Wood – who quietly sniffs the drying socks of Richard Armitage’s dashing but defeated doctor Astrov, leans hopefully towards his mouth during a consoling embrace (only to be met with a platonic kiss on the forehead), and brims with such emotion in the play’s famous closing speech of resolution that she seems to articulate our current sadness without intruding anything on the character’s own truth. Quite a marvel, quite a must-see.

Uncle Vanya is in selected cinemas now. Info: unclevanyacinema.com