Theatre 2024: Uncle Vanya @ CAA Theatre

Are the terms “Russian play” and “happy” oxymorons?  Or perhaps it is the concept of Chekhovian plays that is incongruous with anything lighthearted or joyful?  Because after watching a performance of Anton Chekhov’s classic 1897 work “Uncle Vanya” for the first time, it is hard to imagine a group of more morose, ineffectual people who are not only disappointed with their lots in life but are also bored, unfulfilled and so instilled with inertia that they make no efforts to change their lots in life.  There are a few moments of dark comedy since the characters are so pitiful that you are induced to laugh at the absurdity of their often self-imposed plights.

The setting of the play is a country estate run by Sonya, a plain looking spinster and her uncle, Vanya.  The pair toil endlessly to keep the run-down property going and send all profits to Sonya’s father, an elderly professor who lives in the city.  Also present at the estate is Mariana, an old nursemaid, Vanya’s mother Maria who is an ardent admirer of the professor, Astrov, an old county doctor who Sonya is secretly in love with, and an impoverished neighbouring landowner nicknamed Waffles because of the pockmarks on his face.

Sonya and Vanya’s mundane but familiar existences are thrown into turmoil when the Professor comes for a visit, accompanied by his beautiful and much younger wife Yelena, who he married after the death of his first wife (also Sonya’s mother and Vanya’s sister).  Both Vanya and Astrov are attracted to Yelena and try to woo her despite her being married.  She responds to Vanya’s advances with disdain but reciprocates Astrov’s feelings.  In a North American play, Yelena and Astrov would end up running away together in pursuit of their happy ending.  But this is Chekhov’s world where Yelena stays with the elderly professor who she no longer loves, either out of guilt and a sense of commitment, or more likely due to inertia and lack of will to act.

The other major dramatic plot point occurs when the professor insensitively announces that he has decided to sell the estate in order to fund a more lavish lifestyle for himself and Yelena in the city.  Perhaps they can buy a “summer cottage in Finland”.  He treats the issue that this will leave his daughter and brother-in-law homeless and jobless as a minor inconvenience that he hasn’t fully considered yet and totally ignores the fact that the estate actually belongs to Sonya and is not his to dispose of.  The professor’s thoughtlessness and lack of gratitude towards him finally causes Vanya to explode in rage.  This leads to a huge fight culminating on Vanya firing a gun at point-blank range, missing the professor twice. He is a failure even in this regard and his dismay is comical. After decades of apathy and acceptance, when Vanya finally tries to take action to change his fate, he does not succeed.  In the end, the professor backs off from the idea of selling the estate and leaves with Yelana.  Sonya and Vanya return to their old routines with Sonya comforting Vanya by implying that although they feel unhappiness now, one day they will find peace and joy in heaven.  She softly repeats the words “we shall rest” over and over and over again, as if to emphasize the monotony and emptiness of their current lives.  Despite her hope for the afterlife, this ending felt extremely depressing.

Ironically, Uncle Vanya is based on a prior unsuccessful comedic play called The Wood Demon that Chekhov wrote eight years earlier in 1889.  Featuring a cast of 15 characters (compared to Uncle Vanya’s 8), The Wood Demon was panned as being long-winded, convoluted and facetious, perhaps curing Chekhov from further attempts at writing comedies.  That he was able to trim the cast by half, take the best ideas from The Wood Demon and convert it into the classic drama which is Uncle Vanya speaks to his talent.  Unlike the characters in his play, his strength of character allowed him to turn failure into triumph.

Uncle Vanya was one of the first plays to concentrate on the environment and the harmful effects of over-development at the expense of Nature.  Dr. Astrov was a great proponent of conservation, lamenting the destruction of Russia’s forests.  The play was also lauded for its realistic characters, naturalistic dialogue and universal themes of unfulfilled potential, wasted lives, unrequited love and failed ideals.  Yelena’s name is interesting as this translates to a variation Helen in English and her character draws parallels to Helen of Troy.  While not quite launching a thousand ships and starting an epic war, Yelena’s presence did ignite previously dormant emotions in both Vanya and Astrov.

Although it is part of the Off-Mirvish subscription series, this version of Uncle Vanya is actually a remount of a 2022 Crow’s Theatre production.  Crow’s has impressed us time and again with their innovative staging and while the fixed structure of the CAA theatre limits what can be done, there were still some great touches added to the setting of the crumbling estate where the play takes place.  To emphasize how run down the manor is, in the first scene, water appears to be dripping from the ceiling into a bucket and when Vanya makes his entrance through a set of rickety wooden doors, one of the doors actually comes off its hinges.  A broken beam representing the rafter of the manor extends beyond the stage into the audience, further emphasizing the decrepit state of the home as well as adding a slight touch of immersive staging to the set. The glass wall stage right gives the illusion of a garden on the other side.  I would have liked to see the original staging of this play within Crow’s Theatre’s Guloien Theatre since from accounts that I read, that production was truly immersive and in the round.

The excellent cast included a few familiar faces.  One was the Tom Rooney who played Vanya.  We saw him in the Crow’s Theatre production of 15 Dogs in 2023 and he was superb in that show as the black poodle Majnoun.  Rooney is equally impressive in Uncle Vanya, making you feel his pathos and share in his pain.  Eric Petersen plays the smaller role of the professor with the right amount of arrogance, bluster and insensitivity.  We watched him in several past productions of Billy Bishop Goes to War.  I’m not sure if this is becoming a new Crow’s Theatre trademark, but just like Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 which we watched earlier this year, the program for Uncle Vanya contained a Family Tree to help us tell the characters apart.  Maybe it is because both of these Russian-based plays feature characters with impossibly long names.

From the purpose of enriching our literary and cultural knowledge, watching Uncle Vanya was enlightening and important.  But from an entertainment perspective, my husband Rich summed it up best.  It felt like the theatrical equivalent of eating a kale salad.  He knows that it is good for him but saying he enjoyed the experience might be a bit of a stretch.  One thing that it did do was make us appreciate our own relatively happy and fulfilling lives all the more.