Uncle Vanya, The Print Room - review

Uncle Vanya is a moving play about “what might have been”. It’s Chekhov at his most elegiac, and in this fresh and often witty version by Mike Poulton its portrait of complex relationships feels dense and rich.

Lucy Bailey’s production, with a spare set by William Dudley, at first has a deliberate atmosphere of dusty somnolence. But as the action unfurls, it becomes an aching and in many ways deeply uncomfortable vision of the traps we set for ourselves, and the house the characters inhabit seems painfully cramped.

To speak of action is not quite right, for this is a play all about interactions. The pivotal figure is the self-obsessed Vanya, a scruffy and passionate man who has wasted his life managing the business affairs of Professor Serebryakov, his former brother-in-law.

Recognising that the professor is mediocre despite his rather grand appearance, Vanya is dismayed at the idea of his own almost clownish failure.

Iain Glen’s Vanya is wistful, volatile, sometimes blundering and sometimes sarcastic. Despite looking craggy and serious, he can convey an impression of slouching adolescence, fumbling excitability or pure anguish.

His friendship with the vigorous and boozy doctor, Astrov, is wholly convincing. The part is played with sonorous gusto by William Houston, who makes Astrov brooding yet also talkative, a dreamer with an air of the exotic. He’s an object of great interest for Vanya’s niece Sonya (a sensitive, ardent Charlotte Emmerson) but nurses his own distinctly risky passion for the professor’s frustrated wife Yelena (Lucinda Millward).

Meanwhile, the professor is a pedant who has spent a quarter of a century immersed in the study of art without having any true insight into it. Although he is a posturing tyrant, his hatefulness shouldn’t be glaring, and David Yelland’s interpretation strikes the right note of charmless, speechifying pomposity.

There’s some lovely work in the smaller roles, too, with David Shaw-Parker particularly touching as the landowner Telegin, who strums his guitar sweetly yet can’t get anyone to remember his name.

The rhythm and tempo are perfectly handled by Bailey, and the emotional textures of Chekhov’s tragicomedy are fully realised. This is not the kind of fare The Print Room usually presents but it’s the best production I have seen at this boutique theatre since it opened in September 2010.

Until April 28 (020 7221 6036, the-print-room.org)