Uncle Vanya

First published on 25 Sep 2009. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

A generous serving of regret, a smattering of idleness, more than a smidgen of ennui: not, you'd think, the ingredients for a riveting night at the theatre, in Chekhov's time or ours. In capable hands, though, Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya can be utterly enthralling - and, you may have noticed, there's no shortage of capable hands at work on this production.

In czarist Russia, several restless souls are grumbling around a neglected 26-room country estate. The recently arrived old professor Serebryakov (John Bell) suffers rheumatism and gout while his wife Yelena (Cate Blanchett), 20 years the professor's junior, suffers him. Astrov (Hugo Weaving), the visiting physician, is just, well, sort of hanging around, and Vanya (Richard Roxburgh), a man crumpled in suit and in spirit, is clutching at the radiant Yelena like a lifeline. The days are growing short, and all of them, you get the feeling, are trudging wearily forward on the treadmill of life.

There's dancing, drinking and laughter... But, in Uncle Vanya, the dancing is suddenly interrupted, the drinking is tinged with hopelessness and - as in Vanya's soliloquy - a laugh soon turns into a sob.

It's potentially rather soggy stuff, but Andrew Upton's refashioning of the text (with the assistance of Russian language expert Alex Menglet) provides plenty of opportunities for clowning around - he has Serebryakov facetiously quote Julius Caesar and Vanya miserably declare his ineffectual gun a "piece of shit" in his final fit of pique. Under the direction of Tamas Ascher, who demonstrated similarly fine handling of an ensemble in Sydney Festival's Ivanov in 2009, the cast scrub away at the murk and arrive at something that positively sparkles.

About that cast. It is, of course, a veritable collision of stars, dazzling in its brightness. But let's not forget that these performers are great as well as famous. Bell's Serebryakov transforms from upright man of words to pitiable old bat, a helpless child in the doting arms of the nursemaid Marina (Jacki Weaver), and Weaving is wonderfully light of step, a joy to behold as he launches into one of those limb-flinging Russian dances. Blanchett is a perfect Yelena, extending her arms longingly across the closed lid of an upright piano she never gets to play. She's a vision, a hot streak of lipstick red across set designer Zsolt Khell's canvas of wheaty, rusty browns.

But the show feels like it belongs to Roxburgh's sympathetic portrayal of Vanya, a character who runs on tobacco and years of bitterness and frustration. When he catches Yelena and Astrov in an embrace, Roxburgh is hilarious and heartbreaking at once - locked smile, useless roses held dumbly in position: the tragicomic fool in freeze-frame. The other performers more than hold their own, especially Hayley McElhinney's happy-for-the-time-being Sonya.

Uncle Vanya is a study of unfulfilled longing, and if you're longing for grand theatrical moments you too may end up unfulfilled. Chekhov didn't intend to draw you to the edge of your seat or blow you away - he preferred to get under your skin with depictions of everyday life. Here, the pleasure is in watching superb actors simply existing as these characters: navigating complicated relationships, enduring heartbreak, talking of the weather whenever things get too heavy and enjoying the occasional swig of vodka and midnight snack. That's life. Darryn King

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Preview:

There's little wonder it sold out months before opening. Any Sydney Theatre Company production including John Bell and Cate Blanchett could presume a favourable reception, but they've really gone all out on this one: Uncle Vanya is directed by an international legend, Hungarian Tamás Ascherstar, and stars Richard Roxburgh, Hugo Weaving and Jacki Weaver. It's widely anticipated to be the greatest show in Sydney this year.

All this excitement is, ironically, about the opportunity of watching an unhappily blended family of hopeful losers mope about a rural house procrastinating, whinging and bickering. The play is a display case of lassitude and human failure; it reads as if Samuel Beckett rewrote The Brady Bunch with a hangover. Its pathetic climax occurs in Act 3 (normal for Chekhov, allowing an entire final Act for recriminations and regrets), after the doddering Professor Serebryakov (John Bell) announces he's planning to sell the house, whereupon the biggest loser, Vanya (Richard Roxburgh) fires a gun at him (offstage). Does this sound like a dramatic masterpiece? When we questioned STC's artistic directors about how Chekhov could write one of the greatest modern plays with no direct effective action or heroic attributes, they defended his characters vigorously.

"They're wonderful!" says Andrew Upton, who adapted the 1897 text from a literal translation. Upton treats Chekhov's characters with the same love and care that Dr Chekhov gave to his tubercular patients. Upton's adaptations of Russian classics have been the foundation of some of the most celebrated productions of London's National Theatre in recent years, including The White Guard, which the STC will stage in June 2011. His version of The Cherry Orchard, which the STC staged in 2005 with Robyn Nevin, will be relayed in HD from London to Sydney's Dendy Cinemas in July 2011.

Cate Blanchett, who plays the younger wife of the almost-murdered Professor, is no less enamoured of the characters. "I think all of Chekhov's characters are wonderfully flawed. He always writes with such humanity about tragic situations, but he's a great comedian."

Indeed, Chekhov did call his plays comedies, though their morose mood has become his trademark. "It's laughing through the tears," Blanchett explains. The mood in the rehearsal room, she says, is overwhelmingly positive. "I think all of the actors have wonderful clowns in them as well as being able to access deep pathos. In the end, for me as an actor, it's about who you're in conversation with, and Chekhov always gives us these sprawling, far-reaching conversations, so to be in dialogue with those guys, for an actor it's a dream."

So where does she want the audience to come out after seeing the performance? "I would hope that they've experienced deep sadness and absolute hilarity, and have fallen in and out of love with all the characters (often simultaneously!) in the course of the evening." As Chekhov wrote in one of his many short stories: "How strange... why does God give sweetness of nature, sad, nice, kind eyes, to weak, unhappy useless people - and why are they so attractive?" Jason Catlett