Michael Billington: London theatre
I have measured out my life in productions of Uncle Vanya – two in particular, by Laurence Olivier and Peter Stein, will haunt me to my grave. Katie Mitchell’s RSC/Young Vic co-production may not be on quite the same exalted plane, but it remains a treasurable occasion, penetrating the memory for days afterwards.
David Lan, in the published introduction to his new version, makes the subtle point that whereas The Seagull belongs to the 19th century, in Uncle Vanya Chekhov wrote the first modern play. This strikes me as profoundly true, in that atmosphere prevails over incident. By the end all that really happens is that Vanya and his niece, Sonya, came face to face with the desolation of their infinitely sad lives.
In Uncle Vanya, Chekhov discards melodrama; yet he beautifully orchestrates the quotidian realities of life. And the great thing about Mitchell’s production is that it combines minute attention to detail with a rigorous sense of form. She also has the confidence never to raise her voice: she allows us to eavesdrop, as it were, on intimate conversations to often devastating effect.
This is a rich, detailed production blessed by some excellent performances. Stephen Dillane’s Vanya is an angry obsessive who sees everywhere a mockery of his own wasted potential. Anastasia Hille’s Yelena seems torn apart by her awareness of her own futility. Jo McInnes as Sonya makes you feel that Astrov, in rejecting her, is ruining his own chance of happiness and Linus Roache makes Astrov himself alert to the destructiveness of idleness.
Like all Irish writers, Brian Friel is obsessed by exile and homecoming. But his latest, very Chekhovian, play, Give Me Your Answer Do at London’s Hampstead theatre is specifically about the writer’s sense of exile from self; and it goes on to suggest, with haunting poignancy, that most of us stagger through life adopting masks to disguise our inner uncertainty.
The play sounds abstract, but in fact it is rivetingly specific. The setting is Ballybeg in County Donegal. The dilemma facing the hero – a blocked, hard-up novelist called Tom Connolly – is direct: should he sell his manuscripts to a rich Texan university, assuming they make a handsome offer, or should he persist in his life of obstinate penury?
But that is only the peg for an exploration of the insecurity felt most acutely by the writer but common to all humanity. As played by Niall Buggy, Connolly is an awkward, shambling figure ill at ease in company and only truly himself when weaving fantasies to amuse his mute, institutionalised daughter. But as his wife says of writers: “You’re unhappy in the world you inhabit and you’re more unhappy in the fictional world you create; so you drift through life like exiles from both places.”
With non-judgmental compassion, Friel implies that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. For all this, the play is very funny. The sight of two writers, joined at the hip by fraternal insecurity and a sense of mutual envy, has a hilarious accuracy: even the casual cruelties people inflict on each other arouse bilious laughter. But in the end the play moves one by Friel’s insistence that we all play roles to camouflage our uncertainty; the only difference with writers is that they are more likely to reveal the face behind the mask.
Robin Lefevre’s production is beautifully alert to the play’s tragi-comic mood. Friel is back on top form, writing about life’s disappointments with a wrenching honesty and understanding.