Review: Ensemble shines in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s ‘Uncle Vanya’
- Anita W. Harris
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
When Anton Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya” was first staged more than 125 years ago, it was heralded as groundbreaking Russian theatre. Adapted by Irish playwright Conor McPherson in 2020, the play is now also accessible to modern audiences, and, as directed by Shakespeare Theatre Company Artistic Director Simon Godwin, surprisingly humorous even as it remains existential and weirdly relevant today.
Perhaps because we find ourselves in a moment of transition like the characters in this play — longing for “normalcy” in a world turned upside down, fairness within class difference, and perpetually wishing for love — that their subtle angst feels visceral. Like them, we distract ourselves with each other, wax nostalgic about the past and try not to drink.
The teddybear-like Uncle Vanya (Hugh Bonneville) and his industrious niece Sonya (Melanie Field) manage their run-down manor house in the Russian countryside, sharing it with the elderly “Nana” (Nancy Robinette, understudied well by Anne Darragh) and longtime lodger “Waffles” (Craig Wallace), a former landowner.
Sonya’s widowed father Alexandre (Tom Nelis), a professor, has recently brought his new young bride Yelena (Ito Aghayere) to live there as well so she can bring him tea, however reluctantly, while he stays up all night writing what Vanya believes are useless intellectual pamphlets.
But Yelena is beautiful, and Vanya is smitten. So is local doctor Mikhail Astrov (John Benjamin Hickey), who starts visiting the manor more frequently. The thing is, Sonya has been in love with the doctor forever, which is understandable since Nana describes him as handsome, even though he’s now aging and drinking a lot.
Sonya also finds the doctor’s ideas interesting, and he seems to have a special fascination for ecology, mapping how the surrounding forest has dwindled over time, its animal residents lost, due to shortsighted human activity. (Hmm.)
But Sonya considers herself not beautiful and, in fact, “plain.” What chance does she have compared with Yelena? And though Yelena is aware of Vanya and the doctor’s infatuation with her, what chance does she have of a happy life while locked in marriage to an older man who pays little attention to her as a woman?
All this elusive love leads to a lot of flirting, with flowers, promises to stop drinking and furtive kissing. It also leads to heartbreak.
As the play dances around love and relationships, it reveals an underlying view of life in which people without entitlement have little agency in their own fulfillment, ultimately at the mercy of an apathetic universe or a posthumous heaven where those who toil, namely Sonya and Vanya, can finally “rest.”
Meanwhile, the older generation here, Nana and Waffles, long for a more orderly past when time wasn’t run amok by the professor’s nocturnal hours, and social hierarchies involving “landowner” and “villager” were considered normal. But as the doctor’s forest maps reflect, time and human indifference seem to be leading to an inexorable extinction of the very fabric of their lives.
The genius of this production is that all this is conveyed with such humor and lightness one doesn’t realize it’s happening. The ensemble cast seem to enjoy playing their roles, frequently engaging the audience through eye contact and even speaking to us through the fourth wall. Though all impress, Bonneville’s Vanya is both delightfully funny and endearingly vulnerable, and the spry Hickey makes the doctor’s earnestness palpable, his need to drink believable.
The actors’ fluidity and grace as they move around the manor (scenic design by Robert Brill, with moody lighting by Jen Schriever) is punctuated by small surprises, such as Vanya suddenly emerging from under a blanket, or firing a gun out of nowhere in Act III (and no, it wasn’t hanging on a wall the whole time).
The play as a whole also kind of sneaks into becoming. It opens like a rehearsal, with rugs strewn on the stage and actors in modern dress choosing clothes from a rack under neon lights. Slowly, the set morphs into the more structured rooms of the manor, with costumes (designed by Susan Hilferty and Heather C. Freedman) becoming more appropriate to the turn of the 20th century, until we are wholly immersed under the weight of the play’s emotional finale.
McPherson’s language throughout (he also wrote “Girl from the North Country”) is deceptively easy to follow in conveying the characters’ feelings and thoughts, sustaining our interest through the unusual four-act structure. At intermission you may think, "What could possibly happen next?" not because you are piqued by the mystery of how things will end up, but because you're drawn in by the subtle mysteries these characters are weaving.
Between acts, a lone cellist (Kina Kantor) adds to that enigmatic, somewhat sad mood, as spotlights follow different characters on the darkened stage as if to penetrate their inner lives. The doctor wonders how people in 100 years will look back on them. In many ways, they are like us now — some living selfishly how they want to, while others give of themselves what they think is right. Whether anyone can see that, or cares about their inner lives, is still a question.
“Uncle Vanya” continues through April 20 at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall, 610 F Street NW, Washington, D.C., with shows Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. For tickets and information, call the box office at (202) 547-1122 or visit Shakespearetheatre.org. Run time is 2 hours and 30 minutes, including intermission.
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