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Friday 9 January 2009

Bleak house

Uncle Vanya
Rose Theatre, Kingston

The Death of Margaret Thatcher
Courtyard

The Rose’s opening show, Uncle Vanya, sets off on tour this week. It’s not quite the triumph many critics have described. Nicholas Le Prevost is a brittle, impatient Vanya, an eccentric comedian who gets laughs yet his despair has little tragic intensity. His attempts to seduce Yelena never once seem plausible. Michelle Dockery is a very beautiful and listless Yelena but her boredom is all twiddle-my-thumbs rather than the overwhelming Russian ennui described by Tolstoy as ‘the desire for desires’. Neil Pearson, always good at affable broodiness, is excellent as the tree-hugging medic, Astrov. The besotted Sonya (Loo Brealey) is the only performer who uncovers the pathetic poetry beneath the indolent superficialities. Her big disadvantage is that she’s too attractive for ‘plain’ Sonya, but she disguises this by suggesting a lack of sexual allure with awkward giggles, squirrelly movements and a stupefied beaming naivety. All brilliantly done. It was only during her brief final speech (a miracle of rhetorical compression that starts as a celebration of toil and becomes a sublime and mystical appeal for endurance) that the production reached out and imprisoned my heart. A decent Vanya but hardly a great one.

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