Essential Chekhov

Uncle Vanya comes into the Vaudeville at an artful slouch. Lindsay Posner’s take on Chekhov’s story of bickering Russian sophisticates has an unusual visual style. In Britain we’re used to seeing Chekhov set in some fading Palladian mansion just outside Haslemere or Bath. Designer Christopher Oram has rummaged through the archives and discovered some hideously authentic stylings. He offers us a gloomy Siberian dacha, all cobwebby nooks and stacked timbers painted cowpat brown and carved with ornamental Asiatic doodles. This hulking coffin of a house emphasises the isolation and pinched misery of the play.

The starry cast shine with fitful brilliance. Dr Astrov is played by Sam West, a good-looking blank, whose acting style hovers between heavily sedated and full-on Lazarus. But he’s on sprightly form here and he captures the romance, the quirkiness and the sexual opportunism of the cranky doctor superbly. (Memo to make-up team: Astrov twice mentions his big silly moustache so give him a big silly moustache, not a neatly tonsured goatee.)

Anna Friel, gorgeous in her white frock and piles of lustrous chestnut hair, is a sumptuously superficial Yelena. And, like the best Yelenas, she makes us wonder why any performer would choose to play this boring, manipulative, self-pitying and pointlessly over-educated numbskull. There’s a great cameo from Mark Hadfield, as Telyegin, the lovable cuckold, who fidgets and quivers wonderfully at the margins of the action.

Bustling, rosy-cheeked Ken Stott takes on the title role. With the face of a debauched butcher, and with a Pickwickian beergut straining the buttons of his waistcoat, he looks more like a caricature from late-Regency London than an elegantly wasted intellectual from Edwardian Russia.

Nature has handed Stott a weird inventory of gifts: a clown’s expression, a growling, scabrous voice, and a lot of forthright, angry mannerisms.