´óÏó´«Ã½

I told him it was a tragicomedy about thwarted desire, frustration and loss of hope. ‘Sounds like my life,’ he replied.

Later, I slid a look at him chuckling as Vanya (Nicholas Le Provost) exploded in impotent rage, the like of which I have not seen since Basil Fawlty, and realised that my 47-year-old friend was having no trouble at all relating to the 47-year-old Vanya, despite the century-and-a-bit between them.

Nichlas Le Prevost

‘Everyone’s cranky,’ says Astrov, Neil Pearson’s workaholic, vodka-soused doctor, inveighing against long hours, provincial minds and the tediousness of his existence, while Vanya harangues anyone who will listen about the years he’s wasted serving Serebryakov, the professor (Ronald Pickup), who, in his turn, rails against old age, lack of academic success and a gouty leg.

Grumpy Old Men were forever thus, it seems, long before Rick Wakeman and Jeremy Clarkson gave them a label.

What with two would-be suitors – the infatuated Vanya pawing at her and Astrov paying far more home visits than was ever likely then (and certainly not now) – plus a querulous aged husband to attend to, you’d think that the indolent Yelena would find some diversion. However, she, like almost everyone else in Chekhov’s ‘Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts’, as the play is subtitled, is pathologically bored.

Neil Pearson

Only poor, plain Sonya (Loo Brealey), Vanya’s loyal niece, who has slaved with him to maintain the professor’s estate, keeps the ennui at bay, too busy with the chores for such self-indulgence. But Sonya, too, is frustrated by her unrequited love for the dashing doctor, and it is her moving speech that encapsulates the hopeless of their unfilled lives.

All of which could make Uncle Vanya a bit of a downer. The gloom and doom is certainly there, but the undertow of desperation never swamps because the comedy is so quick and clever. Chekhov’s skill is to play on the irony: he makes you roar with laughter, then lands a punch line to the solar plexus while you’re still gasping for breath that winds you with its awful truthfulness.

The play, directed by Sir Peter Hall, premiered at the new Rose Theatre in Kingston in January and has been applauded for its fresh, modern take, although it’s not a modern interpretation (dread words) as such. Actually, it’s Chekhov’s naturalism that makes it so modern – characters sit around, drink tea and squabble but very little actually happens – which is what made the play so radical when it was first performed in 1900.

For a play that is about inertia, the production fairly whips along, powered by Le Provost’s crackling physical energy.Ìý His mounting tautness, which eventually erupts in the shooting scene, is equalled by Pickup’s splenetic performance as the arrogant but ailing Prof.

Neil Pearson

The characters may be bored but they are never more animated than in the declamation of it.Ìý Pearson, who is best known for playing Essex wide boys in Drop the Dead Donkey and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, is completely at home on the stage and was particularly impressive as emotionally numb eco-visionary Astrov, his dulled senses stirred by Yelena’s poisonous beauty even though he knows it will be the ruin of him.

Astrov’s environmental message – if we don’t save the trees and nurture new ones, we will devastate not just our landscape but our future – is almost jarringly current in this new translation by Stephen Mulrine (did Chekhov’s original script really talk about climate?). The bigger jolt is that Chekhov could see it coming a hundred years ago and we’re still not listening.

Still, my companion left the theatre immensely cheered. I don’t think it was Schadenfreude. He really enjoyed himself – and so did I.

Kate Lock