Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Roger Allam, Richard Armitage, Anna Calder-Marshall, Rosalind Eleazer, Toby Jones, Dearbhla Molloy, Aimee Lou Wood, Peter Wright.
The annoyance of life is such that it only takes one diversion in the perceived day to day normality to throw us from the gentle walk to oblivion and into the realm of unfettered chaos.
Chaos of the mind is certainly what will be remembered when historians look back at 2020 with hindsight, chaos of the soul is how poets and playwrights will present the year of lockdown, loneliness, and arguments of right and wrong; and whilst they are both correct in their respective vision, it is to the neglect of boredom, the shaking up of apathy by a rogue element to which the year should probably be seen as resembling.
Such is the bliss of routine that when the unexpected announces itself and the quiet decay of existence is turned to savage turmoil, the world seems to become angrier, it is the violence against that decay which makes you question your role, how you embraced boredom because there was nothing else to do. A person may stand in the oppressive heat for a year and wish for a rainstorm, but soon regrets that wish when they can’t get dry and sees their health suffer through flu and pneumonia.
Anton Chekhov understood the malaise of life perfectly, and in his perhaps most beautiful but humanly exhausting play, Uncle Vanya, the commotion of boredom is explored fully, and it is the one play that that sums up the desperate hours of misery that accompany the injection of chaos. It is also a production that was cut short by a modern plague, one that might have been lost to many had the team and players not been filmed by the B.B.C. at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London under the observance of social rules.
There is no doubt that to have lost this production would have been a blow to the arts, and along with many other fine theatrical performances that were planned during the year, would have arguably never been seen in such a light again; after all theatre is not just planned, it is the spur of the moment captured for eternity.
The commotion of decay is set perfectly, the fear of living and embracing a sweet moment of love in the unobtainable is madness personified, and with a cast that not only understood the reference but the moment in which they themselves had been placed under the anarchy of isolation, there can be no faulting the appearance of Uncle Vanya on television.
A perfect cast takes the themes of the play and breaks them down to a point where dust is truly exciting, the mean disgruntlement of Astrov, played with sensitivity by Richard Armitage, as he struggles to deplore the death of civilisation through the destruction of the forest and what it means for the future of humanity, the simmering anger of Vanya, captured with enormous delicate persuasion by Toby Jones, and the quiet displaced determination of the neglected Sonya as she battles against others unintended cruel remarks and the beauty of her step-mother Yelena, encapsulate how comfortable we are in misery, how melancholy when it is disturbed by the emotion of passion can put the human mind under stress.
A feast for those who have missed the theatre during 2020, a banquet of deliberation for those unused to the effort that goes into such a production even in what can be considered normal times; Uncle Vanya is theatre at its most undaunted.
Ian D. Hall