Vanya
Duke of York’s Theatre, London
Andrew Scott plays eight characters in this stunning solo version of Chekhov’s great Uncle Vanya. But there’s one he can’t play: Sonia’s mother Anna. She died nine years before the play opens — we learn that right at the outset. Yet she is present in almost every scene here — her absence as tangible as the furniture scattered about the stage.
And that is the measure of Scott’s performance. It’s not just that he manages to conjure, so deftly, the living characters in Chekhov’s masterpiece (which sees Vanya, his niece Sonia, and everyone on their rural estate, brought to a standstill by the arrival of Sonia’s egocentric father and his beautiful second wife). It’s his ability to convey this shared sense of loss and disorientation that makes this staging so revelatory and so moving.
The characters seem to exist in a kind of limbo, haunting the stage and reliving a memory. It’s as if Scott, by wandering on to the stage, flicking on the lights, firing up the kettle and slipping into the first scene, has summoned up that sultry late summer when a moment of crisis brought them all face to face with themselves.
His intimate delivery, together with the easy contemporaneity of Simon Stephens’ adaptation and the makeshift style of Sam Yates’s production, draws us in. We’re working, with Scott, to people this stage with characters, to eavesdrop on their thoughts and invest in them the regrets of our own lives. It’s an approach that celebrates the complicity between writer, actor and audience in creating theatre and that dials up the empathy at the heart of Chekhov’s work.
Stephens’ script is funny, frank and conversational. The nanny Marina re-emerges as shrewdly observant housekeeper Maureen; the hapless Liam (Telegin in the original) crouches on a stool, literally overlooked by everyone. With tiny shifts in body language, Scott nips from one character to another. At one point he morphs straight from the weary, drink-sodden doctor into Sonia, shyly admitting how much she loves him: it brings a new charge to the agony of that scene.
Rosanna Vize’s set is dotted with emotionally charged objects — a swing, a bottle of vodka, a tea-towel, a sink — like a rehearsal room, but also like a dream. Props become Scott’s allies — that swing comes to signify Helena in her sensuous languor, so when he shifts to playing one of the men besotted by her, its gentle swaying keeps her present. When the doctor places the drained vodka bottle down on the table, it sits there tormenting Sonia with his absence. Nestling in the corner is Anna’s piano, its silent keys a reminder of the fingers that used to play them, the metronome nearby suggestive of the way time has slipped away for these characters since she died and the grating pain of her absence.
It’s a benefit to know the play, and there are passages where you might get slightly lost. But this is a beautiful, heartbreaking response to Chekhov’s tragicomedy, which drills into its essence and marvels afresh at the playwright’s ability to craft characters that feel so recognisable. Scott is superb — brilliantly subtle, witty and precise. But there’s also a much deeper and very moving cumulative effect. As he inhabits the characters — or they inhabit him — we see how much they have in common: how much we all have in common. Tremendous.
★★★★★
To October 21, vanyaonstage.com
The White Factory
Marylebone Theatre, London
If Chekhov touches on our shared humanity, Dmitry Glukhovsky’s wrenchingly powerful The White Factory examines what happens when we deny that humanity. His play is a reminder of a terrible chapter of the Holocaust and a cautionary tale about the horrors of trying to negotiate with tyranny (the author himself is currently in exile from Russia because of his anti-war stance).
Glukhovsky traces the story of the Łódź ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, where Jewish elder Chaim Rumkowski tried to save lives by creating an industrial hub, aiming to make its inhabitants indispensable to the Nazis. The “white factory” of the title was a former church turned over to the production of pillows. The vicious irony of a starving Jewish community making feather bedding for their oppressors determines the look of Galya Solodovnikova’s set, a clinical white cube, dotted with pillows, but gradually stained by blood and littered with burnt black flakes as the death count mounts.
We enter the story through the fictitious Yosef Kaufman, a decent and principled Jewish lawyer who, like Rumkowski, is sucked into a series of increasingly hideous deals in a fruitless effort to save his family. Glukhovsky’s stance is not judgmental, but a frank and sympathetic examination of the unspeakable choices forced on ordinary human beings by a brutal totalitarian regime.
It’s an epic, galvanising drama: a rollercoaster of peaceful private moments, sudden casual violence and gathering despair. Some of the exposition is clunky, some of the dialogue stilted. It’s best when simply and tightly focused.
Maxim Didenko’s stark staging plays out as an act of remembrance, characters washing their hands as they enter, live video documenting the action, and is peppered with great performances. James Garnon is silkily vile as SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe; Mark Quartley vividly expresses Kaufman’s excruciating journey; and Adrian Schiller is excellent as Rumkowski, exuding desperation as he gives his infamous speech begging parents to give up their children to save more lives. Unimaginable. Yet true.
★★★★☆
To November 4, marylebonetheatre.com
Mlima’s Tale
Kiln Theatre, London
If you don’t give an elephant a proper burial “he’ll haunt you forever,” says a Somali poacher early in Lynn Nottage’s Mlima’s Tale. In essence, that is what happens in this sorrowful drama about the illegal ivory trade: Mlima, the magnificent “big tusker” slaughtered at its outset, haunts every scene, as Nottage charts the steps by which his tusks end up in a swish penthouse as a “statement piece” of sculpture.
Nottage’s 2018 play is a sobering reminder of how loudly money talks, and how ready consumers are to turn a blind eye. Nottage outlines the chain of people caught up in the trade, entangled by poverty, trickery, compromise or greed. It’s about ivory, but the questions it raises about exploitation and ethical consumerism are broader.
The show’s scope does also present obstacles: scenes are brief; characters remain sketchy. It means we never get into any depth about who they are or the pressures driving them. Yet Miranda Cromwell’s fleet-footed production handles this well, the cast multitasking as many characters, which adds to the sense of twining complexity.
What is not in doubt is the beauty and poignancy of Ira Mandela Siobhan’s performance as Mlima. His movement (choreographed with Shelley Maxwell) is exquisite, combining the slow lilt, innate strength and curious grace of elephants. He is a constant, dignified presence on stage, softly marking characters with chalk as they get involved. It’s quietly understated and very powerful.
★★★★☆
To October 21, kilntheatre.com