Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya

The Sydney Festival has wound up on a critical and box office high, and especially so for fans of theatre and dance. And for all the popular success of the festival, there was a serious classical bent to the theatre. A program featuring a Korean version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, three monologues by Ireland’s Samuel Beckett and a Russian interpretation of Chekhov doesn’t at first seem like populist stuff.

With almost all the Beckett and Chekhov characters disenfranchised and near suicidal, it’s even more surprising that Sydney audiences got so excited. Perhaps festival director Fergus Linehan knows something we don’t about what lies beneath our sparkly Sydney superficialities.

Most of the souls inhabiting Uncle Vanya we would today neatly pathologise as critical manic depressives. But Chekhov dramatised this provincial Russian family well before we became so 20th century-glib with our language of psychological analysis. He even said his characters should be played for laughs.

This Uncle Vanya from the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg brilliantly captures that edge of tragic comedy as everyone flounders in the unhappy awareness that they are not living -“ and will not ever live -“ the life they dreamt of living.

On a beautifully lit, bare wooden stage, punctuated with little furniture and surrounded by walls with many doors, these Russian actors deliver with ease an astonishing detail of character and interaction. Somehow this bunch of whingers and no-hopers are here so fully fleshed that they mirror a universal human disappointment, shared to varying degrees by all of us when we glimpse the end of our life span.

The theatrical result is not a downer but a cathartic exchange of compassion and understanding. Perhaps it helps though that it’s in Russian -“ with surtitles. A playwright friend of mine said she’d never risk nowadays covering the same downbeat whinging theme, say, set in the contemporary Australian outback.

Maly actors, however, spend up to five years perfecting a performance under their director Lev Dodin. Uncle Vanya also has a powerful plea for environmental protection which rings out across more than a hundred years.

By the end all of the family is resigned again to their different fates, their unrequited loves and dreams, the injustices and servitude they suffer. It’s enough to make you run from the theatre resolved to make more of your short life -“ and experience more often special companies from around the world performing the world’s classics.

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