Uncle Vanya

Well I nearly fell of my 4x4. This film version of the stage play Uncle Vanya was rather good.

It starts off slowly and like a lot of Chekhov plays, there are people talking about their existence in rural Russia.

It heats up when Professor Serebryakov (Roger Allam) decides he wants to sell the estate even though it actually belongs to his daughter from his first marriage.

This incident causes Vanya (Toby Jones) to explode with rage.

Allam makes Serebryakov an aloof selfish know it all. I wonder if he realised how close he was to lose his much younger second wife Yelena (Rosalind Eleazar) to the visiting Doctor Astrov (Richard Armitage.)

Good performances from Aimee Lou Wood. She plays young Sonya who with Uncle Vanya toils the estate so her father can have good standard of living in the city. She also has the hots for Dotoe Astrov but he prefers Sonya's stepmother.

Toby Jones comes to his own when he rages about his existence and what could had been in the later acts. With a brother in law like Professor Serebryakov. No wonder Vanya wanted to end it all.

Striking setting, acting as good as anything I've seen. Up to now I've seen Toby Jones mostly in humorous roles; now I understand why he commands such respect as an actor. (I was surprised that he managed to get in a word I've never seen in Chekhov.)

This is certainly one of the best renditions of Vanya you can find streaming. The performances and directing are just outstanding.

I am so pleased that this was filmed and shown in the US. While it is always my preference to be in the room for live theatre, there is no way I would have gotten to see this even if there hadn't been a global pandemic. I can't speak to whether it was a typical performance of Chekhov, but I very much enjoyed the acting (no surprise that Richard Armitage and Toby Jones were excellent and I learned a few new names to watch for).

A rare upside to the brutal COVID pandemic in 2020 was the thought to film and release this otherwise stage-only version of Uncle Vanya. I wasn't at all familiar with Chekhov but I'm a huge fan of Toby Jones so thought I'd give it a whirl when the BBC put it on at Christmas - it was strange at first to see "a performance" filmed and felt like a throwback to 1970s television, slightly awkward, slightly staged. You get into it though and it adds a wild spontaneity to the more tense moments. The 1800s Russian play is obviously not at the height of cultural relevance but there are some startlingly existential beats here that feel timeless - not least the doctor's ideas of deforestation - but more perhaps the concept of the characters "carrying on regardless" like the actors have through plague, through political turmoil, onward and onward. The melancholy of their helplessness, trapped in situations not of their making is striking. "We shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us".