Uncle Vanya, adapted by Conor McPherson from the play by Anton Chekhov, directed by Ian Rickson, 2021.
Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021.
IAN RICKSON’s production of Uncle Vanya, in a new adaptation by the excellent Irish playwright Conor McPherson, had its premiere in the West End in late January 2020; COVID closed it in mid-March. Before it was able to reopen, it was filmed for television by Ross MacGibbon. (In the U.S. it appeared on Great Performances in 2021.) Not having caught it live, I have no way of knowing how much the shuttered theatres and pandemic isolation might have altered what Londoners saw at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the month before the company was sent home, but watching the film, you feel the actors have brought the exasperation and entrapment of the lockdown with them. This is the roughest, most desperate, most highly strung Vanya I’ve ever encountered.
In the opening scene between Dr. Astrov (Richard Armitage) and the old housekeeper Marina (here called Nanny and played with unusual range of emotion by the veteran actress Anna Calder-Marshall), the doctor is already in the depths of existential bewilderment. The bearded, slender Armitage, who played Thorin in the films, is handsome in an almost Byronic way and has a rich vocal instrument; he’s an even more poetic Astrov than Olivier was in the 1963 film of the famous Chichester Theatre production. But the lyrical quality of his readings is befogged—certainly by vodka but also, we intuit, by a sense that, buried as he is in this semi-literate backwater, where he lacks the materials to slow the ravages of typhus and where he rages against the looming demise of the forest he so loves, he feels he’s reached the end of the road.
