Andrew Scott and Hugh Bonneville lead dueling takes on ‘Uncle Vanya'

Washington Post

04-04-2025

A half dozen or more Chekhov plays have hit major stages this spring, with renowned actors biting off big roles — or all of them at once, in the case of Andrew Scott — and invigorating the writer's legacy as a preeminent chronicler of the human condition.
This month, Cate Blanchett concludes her West End run in a cheeky, modern spin on 'The Seagull,' while her 'Tár' co-star Nina Hoss leads the Brooklyn transfer of a British take on 'The Cherry Orchard' that's both intimate and bombastic.
Now, the Northeast Corridor is telling a tale of two Vanyas, with Hugh Bonneville of 'Downton Abbey' headlining a broad and airy 'Uncle Vanya' at Shakespeare Theatre Company, while Scott shape-shifts in 'Vanya,' a London-born solo version shot through with melancholy now running in New York's West Village. Both are fresh, plain-spoken adaptations but could be two entirely different plays if they didn't share the same source material — the genius of which partly lies in its malleability.
There are infinite ways to live a life — or to endure, as Chekhov's characters often feel they must — but only a handful of guiding forces when you really boil it down: Desire, purpose, money, death. (Anything missing probably falls under the first.) You can laugh or cry about it, and Chekhov demonstrates the pleasures and necessities of doing both.
Humor is played to the hilt in artistic director Simon Godwin's staging at STC, which swiftly assumes the rhythms of a drawing room comedy. There is a haut bohemian vibe to the country estate where Bonneville's Vanya and its other perennial residents are compelled to entertain a couple of intrusive city folk: his late sister's widower, the vain intellectual Alexandre (Tom Nelis), and his beguiling, much younger new wife, Yelena (Ito Aghayere). The doctor, Ástrov (John Benjamin Hickey, soulful as ever), is called to tend the former's gout, but lingers to admire the latter's beauty.
It's obvious up front that Sonya (Melanie Field), Alexandre's daughter and Vanya's niece, is smitten and the doctor oblivious — she practically nips at his heels like a puppy. Vanya, here an especially slobby slave to impulse, openly confesses his love for Yelena, who shoos him like a slobbering dog.
The stage is set for disappointment all around, though you wouldn't know it for much of the show. The prevailing mood of leisure betrays only brief hints that they're all quite miserable underneath. That's because in this telling most everyone says exactly what they mean, whether the streamlined dialogue of Connor McPherson's translation encourages them to not. Subtlety and subtext seem to be out for a leisurely hike.
McPherson shifts the setting from Russia to the Ukrainian countryside, where there's a polyglot feel to the ensemble, from Bonneville's British tongue to the booming vowels of Craig Wallace, who lends the family's penniless dependent an unusual assurance. Vanya's mother (Sharon Lockwood), known here as 'Grandmaman,' even gets a French saveur. This collection of disparate cultures — in a story that's ultimately about home — gleans cohesion through design. Robert Brill's romantically distressed set (peeling ivory paint, plush upholstery, faded wood), and the elegantly layered costumes by Susan Hilferty and Heather C. Freedman, add appealing depth and texture where the performance style favors a flat directness.
Bonneville's Vanya is an amusing cad, disarming his resentful gripes with humor that's more charming than it is rightfully pissed off. His performance is an absolute pleasure. But it means that Vanya's pivot to indignation — when Alexandre proposes selling the estate — is too abrupt to buy. He does not ultimately seem like a man who'd try to take anyone's life into his hands.
Joyful though it is, the production's levity costs it believable gravitas as fates descend into resigned ambivalence. Misery in Chekhov so often arises from secret or frustrated longings, which simmer just below the surface, and then boil people from the inside or erupt with scalding intensity. Here, the players are either too easy to read (poor Sonya) or a bit too good at keeping that turmoil under wraps until the moment it bursts into view.
There are benefits to this approach: The co-production with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where Godwin's staging premiered in February, is delightfully buoyant and easy to follow. Little guesswork is required to intuit how anyone really feels. But a thread goes missing when we don't feel like confidants to Chekhov's characters, privy to the inner conflicts they otherwise keep hidden.
Scott has the benefit, in this regard, of being the only one onstage in 'Vanya,' adapted with fleet economy by Simon Stephens and directed with ease and ingenuity by Sam Yates. Every exchange feels like a secret confession. Every character trembles with something they dare not say out loud. There's coyness, intrigue and even palpable eroticism between thwarted lovers who never appear side by side. Somehow, it's also funny as hell.
Scott's embodiment of each character is so vivid and distinct that you can imagine the whole array of them present at once — and how they would respond in a scene, even in their phantom absence. One of the intoxicating effects of his performance is that it allows you to observe a whole constellation of desires, worries and regrets mapped out by a single body. It's a testament to the actor's protean emotional range and readiness that he's able to illuminate so many shades of life. It's also thrilling proof that Chekhov captured the very essence of what it means to be human.
Uncle Vanya, through April 20 at Shakespeare Theatre Company's Harmon Hall in Washington. About 2 hours and 35 minutes with an intermission. shakespearetheatre.org.
Vanya, through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York. About 1 hour and 50 minutes without an intermission. vanyaonstage.com.