Hugh Fraser's without-decor Chekhov production lacks most of the vital sound and lighting effects that help create crucial Chekhovian atmospherics, but still manages to cast a desolate, engrossing spell.
For this beautiful music hall, that now totters towards semi-dereliction, thanks to the bureaucratic dawdling or indifference of the Heritage Lottery Fund's philistines, makes an ideal setting for Chekhov.
It breathes an aura of dilapidation, decay and ghostly melancholia, thereby offering a suitable emotional correlative for the play's despairing mood: Uncle Vanya, like Chekhov's three greater dramas, deals with minor landed gentry, menaced by economic and social decline and personal anguish.
Designer Charlie Cridlan neglects Wilton's high, proscenium stage and builds instead a rhomboid playing area beneath it. She thereby achieves a valuable studio-like intimacy for David Mamet's slightly stripped down, faithful version of Uncle Vanya — a serviceable adaptation, but without the freshness of expression that distinguishes Christopher Hampton's Seagull at the Royal Court.
The defect of Fraser's production has to do with its limited emotional range. It is the governing irony of Uncle Vanya that although his chief characters are possessed by a sense of futility, inertia and passivity, they are variously powered by rage, sexual desperation and intellectual ardour.
Philip Voss's definitive Professor Serebryakov captures the forceful Chekhovian mood. Petulant, furious and bleakly comic in the cruel face of old age and physical decline, he greets Vanya's opposition to his plan to sell the family estate with blistering flurries of contempt.
Colin Stinton looks too mature to be playing Vanya. He adopts and maintains a misconceived air of placid calm, even when pining for Rachel Stirling's statuesque Yelena, who is steeped in sexy languor. His pent-up grief and fury mildly erupt, while Ronan Vibert's confident Astrov, fired with a desire for countryside reform, merely smoulders.
Catherine Cusack's cool, crop-haired, jeans-wearing Sonia seems rather lesbian and perversely more interested in Yelena than Astrov, but Lucinda Curtis as Vanya's scathing mother hits the right notes. A flawed revival but a seductive one.
