Theatre Review: Uncle Vanya At Circa

Circa Theatre - 28 April - 2 June
By Anton Chekhov
Directed by Susan Wilson

Sonya triumphs in Circa’s production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. She ends up cosily poring over the accounts with her loveable dishevelled but charming uncle the eponymous Vanya. She triumphs in failing to attract the arrogant greenie Dr Astov and she is much much better off than the sad but lovely Yelena whose fate it is to jingle off into the sunset with her pompous and disappointing husband.

The two young women are very much at the centre of this production. It is their relationship and their relationships with the other characters that enthral.

Yelena enchanted everybody. Danielle Mason was graceful, responsive and warm. As trophy wife of the self absorbed professor she was gently amused but she was not bitter nor was she brittle. We all loved her. In the scene where she agreed to interrogate Astrov there was a warm sisterliness between the two women. Had she suggested that her stepdaughter Sonya might soften her hairstyle to get her man it might not have seemed out of place.

Stuart Young’s translation delivers the New Zealand window he promises onto a Russian world of a century ago. “Weirdo” where “silly” and “stupid’ have stood gives us better insight.

But it is a pity so little attention is paid to set and costume. Yelena’s dresses didn’t fit. The men’s collars and elephant’s bum pants were op shop tragedies. The government department tea trolley urn/Samovar allowed Sonya no opportunity to be gracious as she scuffled with the cups from the cramped step. The cheap and nasty sideboard had no place in the faded once glorious Russia. There were no flowers until Vanya flourished stiff supermarket red roses. Autumn roses they were not. Armfuls of flowers would have been more his style and more Sonya’s style too. Why didn’t she gather some of the roses herself or find wild flowers or coloured leaves earlier to decorate her home.

The programme notes quote Chekhov: "People dine, merely dine, but at that moment their happiness is being made or their life is being smashed." The family could not dine on food meanly meted out from the sideboard. The late rising professor’s late hours had disturbed life but they didn’t even merely dine and we craved more. More on the table, more faded comfort items, and more visual theatrical things.

The empty set was, however wonderfully filled with the choreographic exploits of Bruce Phillips’ Vanya and Gavin Rutherford’s scrummy strumming Telyegin and even the cold and cruel Astrov was free to move with some semblance of grace.

This play that has in the past seemed static with talking heads bemoaning their fate, leaps into life in this production. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and in particular Bruce Phillips’ uncle Vanya are charming and that was a surprise.

ENDS

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