Denuded birches have become a staple of Chekhov stage settings – although here designer Dick Bird goes a step further by surrounding the Serebryakovs’ estate with a thicket of telegraph poles. It’s an ironic metaphor for a drama that is chiefly about the characters’ inability to communicate, and neatly illustrates Dr Astrov’s prophetic warnings about hacking down forests for the sake of modernity.
Yet the modern world has already encroached on Mark Rosenblatt’s production: Vanya keeps the estate accounts on an Amstrad-style computer; Sonya slobs around the house in jeans. All this seems in line with the revisionist spirit of Anya Reiss’s version of The Seagull, or Benedict Andrews’s Three Sisters, which enlarged Chekhov’s world to include grunge and mobile phones without bending it unrecognisably out of shape.
What it lacks is the touch of impious anarchy that abolishes the Chekhovian default of rural patricians complaining about their lack of stimulation. Samuel Adamson’s new adaptation has some uncompromising outbursts. David Ganly’s Vanya, for instance, expresses fury at being “shafted” by his pedantic brother-in-law, who has “spent 25 years pouring bollocks from one empty jug into another”.
Yet the production frequently succumbs to a state of enervation, from which Dorothea Myer-Bennett’s stand-out performance as a radiant Sonya comes as a welcome relief. Framed by an explosion of orange hair, she bobs about like a stray champagne cork on the sea of ennui, providing a sharp corrective to her stepmother’s protestations of boredom: “There’s plenty to do. It’s a‑farm. Get involved.”
What’s most alarming, however, is how the air of defeatism seems to have spread to the auditorium, where unsold tracts of the playhouse’s Quarry theatre have been masked from view. A charitable interpretation would be to say that it enhances intimacy, but the presence of the drapes renders it not a theatre that is half-full, but inarguably half-empty.
• Until 21 March. Box office: 0113-213 7700. Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.
