2010: Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov

Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov.  Adapted by Andrew Upton, directed by Tamás Ascher.  Sydney Theatre Company at Sydney Theatre, November 9 – December 23, 2010.

Reviewed by Frank McKone

November 24

Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh in Sydney Theatre Company's Uncle Vanya

© Lisa Tomasetti 2010

Despite the success of the first production by Moscow Art Theatre of Uncle Vanya in 1899, I like to imagine that Konstantin Stanislavsky was troubled.  He had not wanted to play the role of the doctor, Mihail Lvovich Astrov “for I had always dreamt of another part – the title role.  But [director] Vladimir Ivanovich managed to break my will and even got me to like Astrov.”

In Ascher’s production, I think Stanislavski’s troubles are over.  Considering he died in 1938, you may think it’s a bit late.  But there’s 111 years of theatrical history behind Ascher’s and Upton’s work, and it shows to perfection in the performances of top-class actors Hugo Weaving (today’s Astrov), Richard Roxburgh (Vanya), Cate Blanchett (Yelena), Hayley McElhinney (Sonya), John Bell (Serebryakov), Jacki Weaver (Nanny), Sandy Gore (Maria), Anthony Phelan (Telegin) and Andrew Tighe (Labourer).

Stanislavski also directed Chekov’s works and in the 1920s and 30s focussed on training actors to perform ‘naturalism’.  His work was the key to making the break from melodrama to the form of drama the 20th Century needed.  But that doesn’t mean that everyone got his ‘system’ right.  I think we were lucky in Australia, from the time of the early NIDA classes and Hayes Gordon, to eschew the ‘American Method’ of Lee Strasbourg. 

Richard Roxburgh and Hugo Weaving in Sydney Theatre Company's Uncle Vanya   
© Lisa Tomasetti 2010

Australians, being perhaps less sentimental than Americans, knew that when Stanislavski said act ‘as if’ you were the character, he never meant ‘become’ the character.  This cast, with this director, backed by their Australian training and experience, demonstrated exactly what Stanislavski meant.  I suspect, too, they also ‘got’ Chekov better than Stanislavski himself had achieved in 1899.

The clue is the fun in this presentation.  Here is the humourist Chekov we know from his short stories and plays like The Proposal.  Weaving skips and even Russian dances about the stage.  Roxburgh swings and sways from gloom to fury, from lust to murderous intent.  The two of them reminded me of Ian McKellen (Estragon) and Roger Rees (Vladimir) in the recent production of Waiting for Godot – the same understanding of the absurdity of the social condition.

One might imagine that the young wife of the old fart professor, so imbued in boredom, would be waspish or merely sad.  Not this Yelena.  Blanchett collapses into unbridled laughter as often as she is the worst manipulator.  And who would have thought that the professor’s horribly put-upon daughter could lose herself so freely in laughter and take the audience along with her, especially in McElhinney’s marvellous scene with Blanchett in Act Two. 

And John Bell at last is free of the constraints he seems to have laid upon himself in recent years.  Compare his Lear with this pretentious old Serebyakov, and Chekov looks better than Shakespeare.

But how is this not mere farce or melodrama?  Because every actor plays their character’s intention behind every facial twitch, every loose movement, every eye contact, every incomprehensible vocalisation, every word which means the opposite of its apparent meaning, or diverts attention away from reality.  As Stanislavsky taught, nothing must happen on stage without the audience being aware of each character’s intention.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, was missed in this production.

A simple demonstration, but a most exciting moment in the play, was the silence after Yelena and Astrov realise that Vanya, bringing roses for her, has seen them kissing.  Such wonderful theatre in which no-one says anything for minutes on end.  My copy of the script has just four dots to indicate no more than a pause before Astrov says [with bravado] ‘The weather is not too bad today.’  On this stage, with this director and these actors, what tension was there – and what laughter from us watching this embarrassed triangle.  What a creation of the illusion of natural reality!  What honour to a master playwright.  What grateful thanks on my part for the skill and artistry of this company.

What a pity for so many of you that the season is fully booked.

 

Sandy Gore and Richard Roxburgh in Sydney Theatre Company's Uncle Vanya
© Lisa Tomasetti 2010

© Frank McKone, Canberra

2010: When the rain stops falling by Andrew Bovell

When the rain stops falling by Andrew Bovell.  A collaboration with Hossein Valamanesh and Brink Productions.  Directed by Chris Drummond at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre, November 10-13, 2010.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
November 10




This production of a play, described by Richard Zoglin in Time as ‘easily the best new play of the year’ at its US premiere at the Lincoln Centre in March this year, is a privilege to behold.  The acting, direction and design all fall into their right places stylistically and technically in a jigsaw puzzle which comes together piece by piece. 

At first there are scattered elements of a picture picked up seemingly at random from four generations leading to the meeting of Gabriel York and his son Andrew Price.  The experience watching is exactly as happens while reconstructing a complex 1000 piece puzzle.  Aha! realisations light up completely unexpectedly when it becomes clear that this or that piece just has to go here or there.  Yet it is not until the very last piece is in place that we feel the tension that we might not have everything correctly understood, fall away.  Only as the last clue is revealed, just as the rain stops falling, do we suddenly feel we can breathe again with satisfaction that all is now positively complete.

Zoglin goes as far as to compare Bovell’s work with the achievements of the novelist William Faulkner.  It is a fair comparison in two ways. 

Faulkner used devices like plain print interspersed with italic print and standard sentence structure interspersed with poetic line forms as a way of shifting from time to time or from internal to external experience.    The result is difficult reading until you allow the feelings expressed in the words to wash into your mind without self-consciously seeking logical understanding or even clarity of events.

Bovell’s writing is theatrically interpreted by this production team to create a similar kind of time and perspective shifting, which as Faulkner achieves in the end of The Sound and the Fury, finally comes into clear focus in the final scene of When the rain stops falling.

But the perhaps more important way that the comparison with Faulkner is sensible is that Bovell, as does Faulkner, creates in his jigsaw, images and themes in words and action which symbolise elements of the human condition which recognisably belong to the writer’s culture – American in Faulkner’s case, and Australian in Bovell’s.  In the local we see the universal. 

It is interesting to read the American Zoglin’s description: ‘The play is unrelievedly bleak but with a denouement of unexpected hope: a moving, almost revelatory evening of theater’ while the Australian audience on opening night in Canberra responded to the many moments of ironic humour which are built into our culture.  We certainly found the unexpected hope, but not an unrelieved bleakness.  In fact, without laughter, I suspect, the unexpected hope at the end would have been maudlin and sentimental.  In this production, it was ultimately satisfying to know that Gabriel and his son Andrew, with the help of a fish falling from the sky, could at last enjoy each other’s company after four generations of emotional disaster.

Bovell’s work, it seems to me, has matured in this play even beyond his earlier Holy Day.  Now he has achieved strength in simplicity, placing him among the great playwrights not only of Australia but around the world.

© Frank McKone, Canberra