Vanya, Duke of York's Theatre review ★★★★★

It shouldn’t work. How could one player capture the listless existence of an extended family holed up together on a country estate? The answer, it seems, is Andrew Scott. The actor, who has delivered star turns in Hamlet, Present Laughter, Fleabag and Sherlock among his many stage and screen roles, delivers a daringly phenomenal performance playing eight characters based on those in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

At times, it’s like watching someone suffering through a period of psychosis. At others, like listening to the illogical babbles of a drunk whose mind has detached itself from reality. Increasingly, it fulfils its intention of being a batty but brilliant, wholly original adaptation of the Russian masterpiece.

While this schizophrenic feat of a performance belongs to Scott alone, adaptor Simon Stephens, director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize share his ‘co-creator’ credits. Vize’s set fits the experimental nature of the production, with its plywood walls and dressing table suggesting we’re backstage and watching something evolving, rather than a freshly dressed rerun.

Scott, in chinos, a half-buttoned shirt and his own Irish accent, flits between the story’s major characters and their minor counterparts. He drops a pair of sunglasses from forehead to eyes to become one, and picks up a cigarette as he slips into another. Some he acknowledges with little more than a mutter, or with an ‘I forgot you were here’ aside, met with gleeful laughs from the portion of the audience familiar with the play. Certainly, you’d want some knowledge of the source material to keep up with who’s present and their motives.

Andrew Scott in Vanya. Photo: Marc Brenner

They’re all here too, in one form or another. At one point, Scott pauses to call out names as if taking a register of the bodies rattling around this sprawling estate.

We’ve got Alexander, here an ailing filmmaker, who with his second wife Helena, has moved into the home of his former mother-in-law Elizabeth, forlorn brother-in-law Ivan (the titular Uncle Vanya), and dowdy daughter Sonia. It’s a place of existing, rather than living. For Sonia, excitement comes only in the form of visits from Michael, a doctor and environmentalist. For Vanya, it’s in the arrival of the young and beautiful Helena. But both crushes are painfully unrequited and the unhappiness on the estate is palpable.

The play’s famous sense of ennui, though, has been replaced with nervous energy: despite Scott being the only physical presence, his many personas make the stage look stiflingly busy.

Andrew Scott in Vanya. Photo: Marc Brenner

Most impressive are the scenes in which his body becomes two characters at once: his arm blocking the doorway as Vanya while his body, as Helena, tries to leave; flirting with himself as an entangled Helena and Michael roll around on the floor. Most entertaining are his late-night scenes as the drunken doctor, chewing the cud with gossipy housekeeper Maureen.

This Vanya is funny for the most part. Yet the play’s most heartbreaking scene, where Sonia is left coaxing Vanya to keep on living, is somehow tender still.

It’s hard to imagine this ambitious adaptation will be staged again. It’s more of a novelty, born out of boldness and the right creatives being available at the right time. It’ll be talked about for decades though. See it so you can say: ‘I was there’.

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