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Uncle Vanya At Sydney Theatre Company – Blog (17nov10)

21 Nov 2010 /
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In an Opal-Harted Country
November 17, 2010
 
Sydney Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya may be the hardest ticket to get in Australia. I frantically fought the crashing STC online ticketing system for nearly an hour to snatch up our tickets when a few last minute seats were released a few weeks ago, after months of being sold out. Of course, the draw is much less about the comi-tragic brooding Russian play, but for the chance to see Australian theatical royalty in the likeness of Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, along with the beloved John Bell and a cast rounded out by some of the greatest actors of the Aussie stage.
When in grad school, I was so lucky to have been given a ticket to see La Blanchett in Hedda Gabler at Brooklyn Academy of Music. While I took issue with the direction, which promoted an ADD Hedda, badly in need of Ritalin, there was no question as to why Blanchett is a movie star – she exudes grace, draws the audience in with her deep voice and regal aloofness. She also got amazing notices, awards and beaucoup ticket sales for her turn last year in Streetcar Named Desire. America, don’t be surprised if you see Uncle Vanya soon enough.
Unlike Hedda and Streetcar, Uncle Vanya is much more of an ensemble piece than star vehicle. The story focuses on a hard-scrabble 19th Century Russian farm, thrown into a deep malaise with the arrival of the long absent part-owner-by-marriage, the sickly professor of arts, Serebryakov (Bell), and his beautiful younger wife, Yelena (Blanchett). He stays up all night complaining of rheumatism pains and she wanders the house in fits of privileged boredom. The regular residents, including Serebryakov’s daughter, Sonya and his brother-in-law (by first marriage), Vanya, are thrown out of their regular routine of struggling daily work, as they tend to the new arrivals. They are cast under their guests’ spell of self-involved laze. Shaking up the family is the country doctor, Astrov (Weaving), who passionately inhabits the forest and philosophizes on the status of man, while lusting over one woman – Yelena – and ignoring the advances of sweet, plain Sonya.
The cast is dazzling in their sheer craft, particularly the powerful Weaving and the solid, yet girlish Hayley McElhinney asSonya. Jackie Weaver grounds the ensemble with the practical pathos of the family nanny, who sees good in everyone and solves all problems with a cup of tea. Blanchett, more suited for powerhouse roles, nonetheless wanders with desperate restlessness and excruciating helplessness, as it never occurs to Yelena to actually relieve her boredom by helping out around the farm.
The biggest mistake one can make when staging Chekhov, as any theatre major will smugly tell you, is missing the humor, and playing only the tragedy. This production makes no such amateur misstep. At times, the comedy is nearly slapstick, like when Yelena and Sonya have an impromptu drunken slumber party, complete with gossip, a pillow fight, and tears. Moreover, the absurdity of the characters’ misery is pointed up continuously, some through physical humor, as with Serebryakov’s grotesque leg pain, and some through verbal humor, as in the hyperbolic rantings of the miserable Vanya. The pacing of the piece, too, is bold. The action unfolds slowly, so out of synch with what we expect from our television viewing attention spans. It may be slow, unfolding over 2 hours and 45 minutes, but there is an underlying energy that moves the action forward, as we adjust to the pace of life in the tedious, repetitive world of the farm.
This new translation by Andrew Upton (Mr. Blanchett, if you will – I’m sure he would not) is helmed by Hungarian director Tamas Ascher. The aesthetic and mood of the piece has an overlay of stereotypically Eastern European clinical detachment. As I mentioned in my review of King Lear, I’ve been told that many Australian theatres gravitate towards a German directing aesthetic, and while this piece did not employ that Brechtian style of sparse set and exposed theatrical conventions, it did have a feeling of intellectualism and a textbook study of how the characters might inhabit their unhappiness. How much more emotionally impactful, I wonder, would this craft-filled production have been if the characters had been fighting for their happiness, rather than resting so solidly in their mal-content?

In his sacred text of directing, The Empty Space, Peter Brook talked about the Deadly Theatre, one that looks right, smells right, feels right, but is lacking in the passion and complexity that drives a truly “holy” theatre experience. It’s the kind of theatre that makes you secretly wonder if you actually like theatre because it is so hard to pinpoint what is wrong. With all that was technically right about this production, it simply smacked, to me, of Deadly Theatre: The characters are playing their types, not their opposites, their happy and hopeful selves. Brook said that “a principle on which all of Shakespeare and all of Chekhov is built” is “shifting oneself totally from one character to another.” It is continual shifting that keeps the three sisters convinced that they are going to Moscow, and it ought to be this shifting that drives Sonya’s final impassioned speech to Vanya about the greater life ahead in heaven; but with these characters having wallowed so thoroughly in their hopelessness for so long, the plea may hit an intellectual note, but hardly an emotional chord. If the characters can never muster the hope to root for themselves, how can we possibly find it inside of our hearts root for them?