Uncle Vanya review – celebrity casting and cringey modernisation undercuts uneven Chekov
Fayssal Bazzi and Philippa Northeast steal the show, but Shaun Micallef is a disaster
For some reason known only to artistic directors, each production of an Anton Chekhov play must be translated anew, as if past translations had been wiped from the collective consciousness the moment the curtain came down. It makes sense, up to a point: nobody needs Constance Garnett’s moth-eaten 1923 translations, which made the characters sound like pompous late-Victorian stiffs. But do we really want them to sound exactly like us? (Spew emoji, amirite?)
Andrew Upton effortlessly translated Uncle Vanya for Sydney Theatre Company, starring his wife, Cate Blanchett, back in 2010. Simon Stephens completely overhauled it for Andrew Scott’s solo performance at the UK’s National Theatre in 2023. And now we have Joanna Murray-Smith’s effort, a playwright known for depicting the bored upper-middle-class milieu in which Chekhov swims.
But shifting a play in time and place isn’t so easy, and comes with traps and pitfalls. Anthony Burgess said “translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture”, and this is true of Chekhov as much as any writer. Yes, he’s a humanist whose characters speak directly to our foibles and frustrations, but he’s also a quintessential Russian portraying a world on the cusp of collapse with the grace notes of a seminarian.
Melbourne Theatre Company’s new production (Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre staged this translation in 2024) starts promisingly, with Dann Barber’s gorgeous set of autumnal poplar trees gently shedding leaves over the playing space, lusciously lit in golds and browns by Paul Jackson. Violent Femmes’ Add It Up plays on the soundtrack, as if warning us of the cascading anachronisms to come. We seem to be standing in two worlds, one foot in the here and now, the other in a receding, elegiac past.
The play opens with Astrov (Fayssal Bazzi), the local doctor, chatting with Nanny (Evelyn Krape), two characters from different social backgrounds who nonetheless interact with ease and intimacy. It’s a reminder that in Chekhov’s universe, class is both porous and monumental. Uncle Vanya (Daniel Henshall) enters, and we learn of the disruption to the household caused by the return of newly retired professor Serebryakov (Shaun Micallef) and his much younger wife, Yelena (Catherine Vǎn-Davies).
These bored, petulant urbanites rule the estate that Vanya and his dogged niece Sonya (Philippa Northeast) have worked for years, and their presence upends the staid but stable routine of the household. Soon everyone is falling in love with someone else, Sonya and Yelena with Astrov, Vanya with Yelena, and Serebryakov increasingly with himself. There is a lot of yelling, some (very well acted) inebriation and even a gun going off – although, as often in Chekhov, nobody’s seriously hurt and everyone remains miserable.
Contested from its very origins (Chekhov fought his director, Konstantin Stanislavski, for more lightness and humour), Uncle Vanya is best thought of as a tragicomedy; or perhaps a variation of Hamlet’s “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”. Performed with the right levels of nuance and solicitude, it shimmers with the radiance of real life.
If only Murray-Smith or director Anne-Louise Sarks trusted the actors to reach for these levels of attentiveness, maybe the production wouldn’t feel so forced and insistent. As those anachronisms mount (“Don’t be such a drama queen, Vanya”, or “No one says bonking any more”, not to mention all the “fucks” and “fuck offs), the play drifts further and further away from its centre, often veering dangerously close to farce. It recovers some gravitas towards the very end, in a mournful coda of regret and acceptance, but it’s far too late by then to truly care.
Performances are uneven. Henshall seems to heave his emotions into his throat like he’s doing bench presses, which creates a tumult without much heat or genuine grief; Krape is gorgeous as the affable nanny, and Northeast is crisp and soulful as Sonya. Vǎn-Davies never quite progresses from bored heiress into tragic heroine. But Bazzi is everything one would want from the cracked and noble doctor. He and Northeast often make the play feel entirely theirs.
As the pontifical professor, Micallef is a disaster – surely the most egregious celebrity casting since Shane Crawford’s atrocious Pharaoh in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat – all silly, floppy gesticulations and cartoonish face-pulling. Taking his character entirely from Vanya’s mean-spirited description of him, Micallef plays the role like a Basil Fawlty understudy barking into a void.
Uncle Vanya can’t really recover from such unevenness of tone, although Chekhov’s original conception is so strong it almost survives the onslaught. Sarks and Murray-Smith leave no room for silence or contemplation and no space for ambiguity – the very aspects of the play that make it glisten. Gestural and declamatory, the performances shout their intentions at the audience rather than encouraging us to lean in and surmise. Far from bridging the gap between our world and that of the play, the aggressive modernisations drive a wedge between it instead. Imperial Russia never felt further away.
Uncle Vanya is on at Arts Centre Melbourne until 22 August.