At first sight, the set of Fennec Fox Productions’ Uncle Vanya announces itself loudly: from the Cornelia Parker-inspired exploded shed suspended above the stage, to the grave-shaped mound of earth, to the figure who the audience comes to understand as Faith (Elektra Voulgari Cleare), the deceased sister of John/Vanya, lying beneath a table. Yet when the first two actors, Nanny (Georgina Cooper) and Michael (Rufus Shutter), the doctor, came on stage to a constant, quiet murmur of birdsong and began to discuss tea and how long they have known each other, a tender softness brushed over the stage. As seen right from this first scene, pauses matter in Uncle Vanya. The cast understand silence as suspension – a breathing and intense kind of hesitation which heightens, rather than diffuses, drama. Perhaps, rather than the exploded moment that the brilliant set initially suggests, what we as the audience enter is an exploding moment: anatomised and suspended mid-fall.
The play weaves between ordinary conversations and fractious collisions of a complex extended family who are navigating a chaotic network of familial or romantic relationships which all tangle and interrelate. This breakdown of relationships is held against a backdrop of ecological degradation, emphatically shown by the shards of wood above the stage. The monologue Chekhov gives the doctor, Michael, about the death and destruction of forests is remarkable when read in its late-19th-century context. The play asks what happens when mankind is faced with external, interpersonal, and internal breakdowns simultaneously, and does not seem to provide answers. A sense of the unanswerable is suggested by the silent and mysterious lingering of Faith. Her presence on stage is not explicitly marked in the script of Robert Icke’s translation of Uncle Vanya, but Icke hints at her importance through her appearance on the character list, explaining in brackets that she is “deceased before the play begins, but very much still in the house.”
The choice of director Joshua Robey to use Icke’s translation is an exciting one: in this taut, modern translation of Chekhov’s late-19th-century Russian, various aspects ring differently in order to more keenly tune the play to Chekhov’s vision. This returns the play to a purer, more faithful, and therefore more piercing form. For instance, names are changed from Russian vernacular names and nicknames to those which an English audience would recognise as normal and mundane, most evidently from ‘Vanya’ to ‘John.’ The production extended Icke’s vision of how Chekhov might be translated in such a way to express its energy. Quoted in Industry Magazine, Oxford, Robey describes English Chekhov as “that Edwardian mode where the Russian estate becomes an English country garden and everyone speaks as though they’re on stilts.” Robey’s Uncle Vanya certainly ‘unlearns’ this type of English Chekhov: it finds something rawer, hungrier, and closer to soil.
Having described the cast’s ability to sit in the silences they create, it is important to note that they certainly do earn and embrace moments of heightened intensity. Too often with performances of Uncle Vanya, it seems that the climactic moment of John’s murderous outburst comes too early considering the anti-climactic sweeping up of characters into the final act, and a frequent critique of performances of the play is that it is difficult to sustain an intensity through the more underwhelming end. Yet, in Fennec Fox Productions’ crisp balance of intensity with mundanity and stillness, the slightly unbalanced structure of the play is confidently executed, even down to the delay of the falling leaves to moments after the gunshot. They land not as a shock but a sigh, and this could describe the wider structure of the play: after the sudden shock of the gunshot, the silence that is distilled through the final act settles much like the leaves on the floor of the stage.
There’s humour, too – a refusal of the cast to take the sometimes excruciating introspection and self-torment of their characters too seriously. The moments of lightness feel earned, and never at odds with despair – in fact, it is often the ludicrous or ridiculous moments which feel most tragic. Ezana Betru’s John (Vanya) in particular carries a bruised and often manic humour that tips over into despair over the course of the play. The character of Cartwright, played by Oli Spooner, brings to the play a hint of absurdity in the timing of his guitar, playing songs such as ‘Blackbird’, which jarr comically with the gravity and awkwardness of the moment it follows.
The leaning on Adrianne Lenker’s work in these musical sections is in line with the current increase in her popularity, and worked well. Her poetic streams of rhyme are fitting for this play, particularly the repetition of the line in ‘Ingydar’, “everything eats and is eaten, time is fed.” This suggestion of a lack of movement, or containment of any movement within a closed system of the stage, is reminiscent of Chekhov’s own frequent emphasis on a contained interior space as a theatrical space: a house, a room, a grave, or a body. The production anticipates the grave long before death is mentioned, a nod to Chekhov’s ‘gun principle’: what is buried in Act One must surely rise by the end. Or rather, what is doomed to be buried will be so by the end: namely, the gun with which John fails to kill Alexander. Either way, ‘everything eats and is eaten’ – or rather, everyone hurts and is hurting. Characters suggest for each other and experience for themselves, in their various and finely nuanced ways, the pain of misunderstanding, unrequited love, failure of timing, and the crumbling of the external world which pulls them down with it.
From the production company known recently for their work with contemporary plays such as Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, the revitalising of the late-19th-century Uncle Vanya was a new venture for Fennec Fox. Yet it does share with The Writer and The Children an insistent oscillation between ordinariness and explosivity. Taking Robert Icke’s lucid translation and running with it confidently, Fennec Fox Productions’ Uncle Vanya proves to be an impressive, energised performance.
Uncle Vanya is running at the Keble O’Reilly Theatre, 29th October – 2nd November.