Laurence Olivier wasn’t exactly famous for his generosity towards rival actors. But even he was moved to write in his autobiography that Michael Redgrave’s Uncle Vanya was “the best performance I’ve ever seen in anything”. Olivier may, of course, have been swayed by the fact that he himself directed this renowned Chekhov production at Chichester in 1962-63 and played alongside Redgrave in the role of Astrov. But I’m tempted to agree with Olivier’s verdict, and anyone who wants to make up their own mind can catch Redgrave’s performance in the production on DVD.
I had been fascinated by Redgrave long before his Uncle Vanya. I had seen him play Hamlet, Antony and Benedick on stage, and been mesmerised by him on screen in movies such as The Browning Version and Dead of Night. No actor was better at portraying divided souls whose intellect and emotion always seemed to be engaged in furious conflict. Only years later, when reading Alan Strachan’s marvellous biography of Redgrave, did I realise how much the actor’s capacity to play tormented figures was connected to his own bisexual nature.
Even with Uncle Vanya, a 47-year-old hopelessly in love with the beautiful Yelena, Redgrave brought out the character’s split personality. With his floppy hair and absurdly large cravat, Redgrave looked like a tousled adolescent waking up in middle age to the fact that life has passed him by. Redgrave also captured the key fact about Vanya (and many other Chekhov characters): that it is possible to be comic outside and tragic inside.
There was something ridiculous about Redgrave’s moony infatuation with Yelena, yet the moment he caught her in a passionate embrace with Olivier’s Astrov and offered her a bouquet of “exquisite, mournful roses” was enough to break the heart.
The high point of Redgrave’s performance, however, came in the great scene where Vanya explodes with rage at the Professor’s plan to sell the estate and makes to shoot him.
Redgrave was brilliantly reduced to babbling incoherence as, contemplating his wasted life, he cried: “I could have been a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky.” Yet the despair elided into farce as he took a pot shot at the Professor and missed. It is all there in Chekhov’s writing, but what Redgrave caught sublimely was the violent oscillation of Vanya’s mood swings, and his recognition of his own futility.
I’ve been lucky to see many fine performances of the role, including Simon Russell Beale’s at the Donmar Warehouse and Roger Allam’s more recently at the Minerva, Chichester. But if Redgrave’s remains the benchmark, it is because he caught to perfection the essential Chekhov quality of “what-might-have-been”.
