Hugh Bonneville stars in an impressively poised revival of ‘Uncle Vanya' at Berkeley Rep

Los Angeles Times

19-03-2025

Berkeley — It's astonishing what a good director can do. The best among them can turn the disparate elements of theater into something seamlessly whole.
Simon Godwin, artistic director of Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., pulls off this feat in 'Uncle Vanya,' a production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre that has one foot in the 21st century and another at the turn of the 20th.
Irish playwright Conor McPherson has adapted Anton Chekhov's 1897 drama, and the result is a conversational English version without any of the starchiness that attaches to the more self-consciously 'classical' translations. McPherson takes liberties, setting the play in 1900 central Ukraine and, perhaps more consequently, elucidating the psychology where Chekhov was a tad more ambiguous. He also gives these Chekhovian wobblers more spine while curtailing some of the excesses that threaten to turn character into caricature.
Godwin's superb company, led by Hugh Bonneville ('Downton Abbey') in the title role, smoothly delivers the dialogue as though it were one of McPherson's original plays. There isn't even any awkwardness about the clash of accents.
At one point, Melanie Field, who plays Sonya, mocks the plummy British sound of Bonneville's Vanya. For a brief second, the fourth wall of Godwin's production is breached. But this momentary interruption in the normal order hardly matters because the ensemble is so comfortably aligned in the theatrical universe that Godwin has created.
The staging has an aesthetic unity that's helped along by the airy, graceful scenic design of Robert Brill and the pastiche costumes of Susan Hilferty and Heather C. Freedman that balance the play's era and our own. Cellist Kina Kantor, an ensemble member who shadows the action, provides musical accompaniment that lends the human comedy an indisputable gravity.
The freedom of this 'Uncle Vanya,' a co-production between Berkeley Rep (where it runs through Sunday) and Shakespeare Theatre Company (where it runs from March 30 through April 20), refreshes the play. Unlike last season's Lincoln Center Theater revival, directed by Lila Neugebauer, this production has a stylistic sure-footedness. All the actors are on the same page, equally at home with Chekhov's realism and buoyant theatricality.
The success Godwin has had with Shakespeare — he directed a muscular 'Macbeth' last year starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma — is evident in the agility of his approach here. One of the mistakes directors make is assuming that Chekhov's plays offer a naturalistic slice of life. Chekhov bares the inner lives of his characters. No playwright of the modern era has more compassionately — or accurately — dramatized the human consciousness of time, loss and the gap between hope and reality. But the plays are rigorously composed works of art, availing themselves of a theatrical vocabulary that extends beyond photographic realism.
'Uncle Vanya,' in short, isn't a television drama, much as contemporary actors trained for the camera might barrel forward in a mumbling Netflix fashion. Godwin attends to the spatial patterns of the play, the movement of character across the stage in clean formal patterns that might suggest a dance piece titled 'Exits and Entrances' were Chekhov's artistic hand not so discreet.
But it's the characterizations that distinguish this production. Bonneville, resembling a canceled journalist wallowing in sarcasm with a bottle of booze, lends Vanya a flailing, self-deprecating levity. Vanya doesn't need anyone to tell him that he's a miscast romantic, too goofy to have his heartbreak taken seriously. It's a credit to Bonneville's performance that we feel the character's disappointment in love and in life all the more acutely.
The object of Vanya's mad infatuation is Yelena (Ito Aghayere), the much younger wife of the retired professor, Alexandre (Tom Nelis), who was married to Vanya's late sister. Alexandre and Yelena's arrival at the country estate managed by Vanya and Sonya, the professor's put-upon daughter, has thrown the household into chaos.
Vanya can think only of Yelena while Sonya is in the throes of love for Ástrov (John Benjamin Hickey), who has become smitten with Yelena while attending to the hypochondriac professor and drinking with his old buddy Vanya. Aghayere's distinctive Yelena is too much a frustrated human being to come across, as she often does in revivals, as an aloof siren. Her dissatisfaction with her crabby old husband drives her into the same state of amorous turmoil that Vanya and Sonya find themselves in.
Great beauty turns out to be no defense against the longings of the heart. Aghayere's Yelena represents an evolution of Chekhov's character. It's no wonder that, as she plays the piano despite her husband's demand for silence (a McPherson twist ), everyone falls under the spell of her seductive defiance.
Field's somber, clear-eyed Sonya has ardent desires but few illusions. If it weren't for Yelena's meddling, she'd let the dream of a life with Ástrov pass her by without a murmur. The sorrow she feels is crushing but not new to her. Field's Sonya looks as if she has been holding back tears ever since her mother died. Her stoicism is all the more ennobling, given how much it costs her.
Hickey never loses sight of the doctor's dual nature. The idealism that makes Ástrov so appealing — he's a passionate environmentalist and a medical humanitarian — doesn't negate the casual self-destruction and dismissive carelessness that lead him to guzzle vodka and ignore the tumult his visits engender.
Nelis renders the professor a pompous and pedantic twit but not a heartless one. He isn't allowed to become the play's villain despite his selfish plan to sell the estate out from under his family. Sharon Lockwood's Maríya, Vanya's mother, is similarly endowed with redeeming qualities. She still drives her son insane with the way she worships the professor, but she's not as infuriatingly unreasonable as Chekhov permits her to be.
McPherson extends Chekhov's soulful generosity throughout the cast. Craig Wallace's Telégin, known as 'Waffles' for his pockmarked skin, is an amiable fumbler yet suffused with kindness and possessing an implacable decency. Nancy Robinette as Marína, the elderly nanny who comforts those she has long served with maternal acceptance, maintains the long view in a household caught up in short-term squabbles.
The ending of 'Uncle Vanya,' a theatrical oil painting of human endurance, is exquisitely executed. As Bonneville's Vanya and Field's Sonya take shelter from the devastation of their dreams in the daily grind of their work, an image of life as it is authentically experienced is renewed onstage. Chekhov may not falsely console, but he dignifies the human struggle in a secular parable that lives again through the magic of ensemble brio and a director at the top of his game.