Terry Johnson has directed his own new version of Chekhov’s masterpiece and has done a perfectly decent job. But, while this production contains some fine performances, it could afford to push the play’s emotional elements to wilder extremes and make greater use of symphonic sound in a play subtitled “Scenes from country life in four acts”. The language in Johnson’s version is more brutally direct than usual: Vanya describes the professor as “the luckiest sod I’ve ever met” and later says “I’ve worked my arse off for that man.” I’ve no issue with that. I was more bothered by the failure to exploit the sights and sounds that make Chekhov’s play a visual and aural poem: the chirping crickets, the banging window that heralds a night storm, the jingling harness-bells that proclaim the departure of the professor and his disruptively beautiful wife, Yeliena, are all dimly present but there is too much dead air in the production.
Alan Cox, however, is a first-rate Vanya: a fretful, brooding, prematurely ageing figure with a salt-and-pepper beard who, like so many of Chekhov’s heroes, is tragic in his own estimation but fatally comic to others. Alec Newman also brings the right ecological fervour to Astrov, Robin Soans is tetchily dictatorial as the Professor and June Watson is unforgettable as the practical, God-fearing old nurse: the moment when, in a sign of the instinctive rapport of the elderly, she comforts the sick Prof is as moving as anything in the evening.
I welcome the fact that Alice Bailey Johnson plays Sonya, passionately devoted to Astrov, not as a dreary drudge but as a vibrant figure he is mad to overlook. It seems tough, however, on Abbey Lee to ask her to make her stage debut as Yeliena and, while she communicates the character’s languorous indolence, she could do more to suggest her aching desire for the doctor.
It is always a pleasure to see this heart-wrenching play, even if Johnson’s production lacks the rage for life that accompanies the Chekhovian sense of death.
