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 The TheatreguideLondon Review

Vanya
Gate Theatre Autumn 2009

Uncle Vanya, like all Chekhov's plays, operates on many interconnected levels, and Sam Holcroft's new adaptation very skilfully and sensitively slices out one layer for us to look at on its own. The result is not all of Chekhov, but it's in Chekhov, and it's a very sweet, sad and occasionally comic look at love and self-discovery.

Vanya has wasted his life working for his unappreciative brother-in-law, while loving Yelena, who has become the boss's second wife. Meanwhile niece/daughter/stepdaughter Sonya has been pining for the handsome local doctor Astrov, and now Yelena and Astrov meet.

Are you keeping score? Vanya and Astrov love Yelena, Yelena and Sonya love Astrov, and nobody, as they will slowly come to realise, seems able to love either Vanya or Sonya.

There are elements of comedy in that situation, as both Chekhov and Holcroft realise - most evident in the moments when Sonya tries to make the self-absorbed Astrov notice her or when Yelena tries to defuse a too-erotically-charged moment with Astrov by half-heartedly singing Sonya's praises.

But mainly the play - Holcroft's and at least in part Chekhov's - is about the pain of loving and being loved, and interestingly Holcroft draws our attention more to the women than the men,

Vanya, we sense, is too old and set in his loser's ways for us to offer him more than passing pity, and Astrov is too pedantic and self-deluding (He comes across more like the brother-in-law/husband/father in the original than like Chekhov's Astrov) for us to believe he'll suffer much, whatever the outcome.

But Holcroft makes us see a Yelena who has been allowed to be beautiful but nothing else all her life, and who knows that that is all that men can see in her (She's briefly attracted to Astrov because once again she falls prey to the hope that he might be different).

And in Sonya, who is a good soul and wants nothing more than to be loved - or just allowed to love - for the good soul she is, Holcroft gives us a truly Chekhovian character, the small person whose small tragedy we are forced to recognise as real and worthy of our concern.

Much credit to director Natalie Abrahami for seeing the emotional depth and complexity of the play and guiding her actors toward expressing it, and to the cast themselves.

Robert Goodale brings into this Vanya all the other layers of pain the character carries in Chekhov, while Simon Wilson properly makes Astrov a cold, self-absorbed zealot rather than the amiable amateur of the original. But it is Susie Trayling's Yelena, moving from seemingly implacable cool to despair and then self-disgust for using her feminine wiles and for hoping they weren't what was attracting the doctor; and especially Fiona Button's Sonya, taking us from girlish shyness to adult passion to agonised rejection to resignation and stoic carrying-on, who have the play's hardest emotional journeys and who hold our attention and sympathy throughout.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Vanya - Gate Theatre 2009