Uncle Vanya, Orange Tree Theatre review — Trevor Nunn’s staging is painful and powerful

So often has Uncle Vanya been reframed over recent years — Andrew Scott’s dazzling solo version being a case in point — that it’s now quite rare to find a samovar on stage. But a gleaming one sits centre stage in Trevor Nunn’s new production (at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond upon Thames), glowing proudly as if to reassure audiences that this Chekhov will be safely contained in 1897 Russia. Indeed, Nunn’s staging keeps to its period, with the men stuffed into boots, braces and jackets and the women trussed up in sweeping skirts and mutton-sleeved blouses.

While it doesn’t spring any surprises, Nunn’s quietly moving, naturalistic staging still reminds you what a radical play this is. The costumes, though period, are not pretty — the boots squeak, Vanya’s jacket looks realistically itchy, Elena’s dresses seem to be wearing her rather than the other way around. And Chekhov’s warts-and-all depiction of a group of disconsolate souls rattling round a country estate in the late summer heat is so painfully truthful about human nature that, if it is played sincerely, it breaks your heart every time — no matter what is heating the water.

Nunn’s staging takes a while to get going — the opening scenes roll out with the languid pace of a steamy summer’s day. This exacts a toll. Some key moments feel underpowered, such as the visiting professor’s high-handed demand for tea in his room (having kept the company waiting for him for hours), or a heated exchange between him and his young wife, Elena, about his supposed ailments.

The production gathers in pace and force, using the intimacy of this small, in-the-round stage beautifully. The characters’ complaints about feeling trapped resound here: James Lance’s dishevelled, sardonic Vanya and Andrew Richardson’s impulsive, imaginative doctor feel too big for the space — both intelligent men whose hopes have been ground down into drunken cynicism by life. And when individuals confide their feelings, it almost feels indecent, as if we are spying on them.

The climactic scene is painfully good. As the professor delivers his bombshell about selling the estate, the others — who have just had their hearts broken or their hopes dashed — sit bewildered. Sonya and Elena perch rigidly on the sofa, Lily Sacofsky’s Elena staring into the middle distance, Madeleine Gray’s Sonya smiling tightly in an effort not to break down. Lance’s Vanya sprawls on a chair as if he has just been flung there by events, despair churning in him. The professor’s utter self-absorption and failure to notice their distress emerges as downright callous — but William Chubb lets us see that he too is kept awake by nagging self-doubt.

It’s a play in which, on one level, nothing changes — no one gets together, no one is shot — and yet, everything does. Vanya, Sonya, Elena and Astrov have all been brought face to face with painful truths. The realisation that nothing will change — on a personal level and, when it comes to Astrov’s pioneering environmental work, on a bigger level too — is what hurts. Nunn’s production makes you feel that shift, nowhere more so than in Gray’s immensely moving Sonya, dreams destroyed, battling on through the accounts.

★★★★☆

To April 13, orangetreetheatre.co.uk