UNCLE VANYA
SCENES FROM COUNTRY LIFE
Anton Chekhov
UNCLE VANYA
SCENES FROM COUNTRY LIFE
a new adaptation by Robert Icke
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Copyright © Robert Icke, 2016
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Uncollected Thoughts on Uncle Vanya
The doctor looks at human beings as insects. When he’s drunk. Once a month, he gets this drunk. Once a month he lets himself get lost in his maps, which show how humans have destroyed their own habitats. Michael tries to humanise the maps for Elena, but they remain inaccessible, forensic: bacterial slides. But then, outside the window, bereft of the forests that the maps eulogise, wild life is dying.
The play is neither sentimental nor judgmental. It’s real life. It’s people eating, drinking and sleeping. It’s theatre. Dramatic tension. Soliloquies. It knows that sometimes we get sad and we don’t know why, it knows that we often give others the advice we need ourselves; it knows that it sometimes takes several failed attempts to articulate what we mean – and that sometimes, there are no words for the job. It knows that in life, you can’t see the future. Everything every character says might be true. (When John claims that, under different circumstances, he could have been a Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky, he is both true and false, comic and tragic.)
Elena has a weakness for talented people, just as Michael has one for beautiful people. Sonya thinks Sonya’s not beautiful. Alexander thinks Alexander’s ill. Elena thinks that Elena’s a good person. She tries to help Sonya by asking Michael whether or not he loves her. He eventually thinks Elena’s manipulating him. Out of such misunderstandings is comedy born – but also tragedy. (Is the play a comedy? Is your life one?)
Michael and Sonya know how to talk to each other, and seem to get on. John and Elena are ‘good friends’, and John loves her, he says (though she can’t seem to respond). These relationships might be budding. It’s hard to tell. There’s a storm, later. And at the end, they say goodbye. It might be forever. The cows have got to the young trees, after all. It might not be forever. But then delicate ecosystems sometimes don’t survive the winter.
People go by nicknames, French names. People go by titles: Professor, Doctor, mother, wife, stepdaughter, daughter, father, godfather, Nanny – and Uncle. Sonya has two fathers: her real one, and her uncle. Two mothers live in the house, Nanny and Maria (the nurturer and the immaculate conceiver). Michael and Sonya love forests. Elena and Michael both think the world holds no happiness for them. John and Elena are both ‘just incredibly boring’.
A series of failures. Might have beens. Cartwright’s marriage. John’s achievements. Elena’s music. Alexander’s career, perhaps. Connections. Romances. An emergency surgery a few months ago. John’s gunshots are two more failures, perhaps, but then failure too can be redeeming. If a bullet hit Alexander, the play would be very different.
Time washes gently under foot. Twenty-five years John has worked on this estate. Six years Sonya’s been in love with Michael. Nanny’s known Michael for eleven years. She calculates that by working out how long it’s been since Faith’s death (there was the time before, and now the time after): nine years. Maybe more. Time stretches out before us like a yawn – open, intimidating – the potential to leave the world better than we found it.
Faith is gone. She cried and wasted away. People aren’t happy. The forests are almost all destroyed. Michael thinks we might not leave any lasting legacy to the people of the future; John thinks John might not make it until tomorrow; Sonya thinks we should keep going. It’s sometimes the right advice. And then it’s sometimes time for bed.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to a whole host of generous people who read drafts, watched run-throughs, and generally suggested ways to make things better. First and foremost: the actors and creative team of the first production; and then, in alphabetical order, Jocelyn Cox, Rupert Goold, Daniel Raggett, Helen Rappaport and Laurence Senelick.
Robert Icke
January 2016
Contents
Acknowledgements
Characters
A note on the play
A note on the text
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
By the same author
Characters
JOHN (UNCLE JOHNNY), 47
MARIA
his mother, and the widow of a government official
SONYA
his niece
ALEXANDER
her father, a retired Professor of Aesthetics
ELENA
the professor’s second wife, 27
CARTWRIGHT
who lives on the estate
NANNY
who has worked for the family for a long time
MICHAEL
a doctor
FAITH
Sonya’s mother and John’s sister – the Professor’s first wife.
(deceased before the play begins, but still very much in the house)
This adaptation was commissioned by and originally produced at the Almeida, where it had its first performance on 5 February, 2016.
Cast (in alphabetical order) | |
Sonya | Jessica Brown Findlay |
Elena | Vanessa Kirby |
Cartwright | Richard Lumsden |
Alexander | Hilton McRae |
Michael | Tobias Menzies |
Nanny | Ann Queensberry |
John | Paul Rhys |
Maria | Susan Wooldridge |
Creative Team | |
Direction | Robert Icke |
Set | Hildegard Bechtler |
Costume | Jessica Curtis |
Light | Jackie Shemesh |
Sound | Ian Dickinson for Autograph |
Casting | Julia Horan CDG |
Assistant Direction | Jocelyn Cox |
Fight Direction | Kevin McCurdy |
Original Composition | Richard Lumsden |
Production Team | |
Production Manager | Aggi Agostino |
Company Stage Manager | Sarah Alford-Smith |
Deputy Stage Manager | Lorna Seymour |
Assistant Stage Manager | Erin McCulloch |
Production and rehearsal photos by | Manuel Harlan |
In real life, people don’t spend every single minute shooting each other, hanging themselves, and confessing love. They don’t always say clever things. They are occupied with eating, drinking, flirting, and saying stupid things – which is what should be shown on the stage. A play should be written in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather, and play cards.
Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are. Not on stilts. Let everything on the stage be just as complicated – and at the same time just as simple – as it is in life. People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the while their happiness is being established – or their lives are being broken up.
Anton Chekhov
A note on the play
This version was written to be produced in contemporary or timeless costume, but short of a few cuts and gentle updates, is faithful to Chekhov’s play and intentions. That is, the time is now.
Some small characters have been trimmed: a workman and particularly, a watchman, who, for Chekhov’s audience, would have functioned as little more than a familiar sound: the Russian night watchman, a familiar fixture of country estates, patrolled the grounds at night knocking with a long wooden rattle, which discouraged intruders and reassured those living there. In modern terms, he’s simply the regular beep of a security alarm.
The translation of the Russian names (at the time of writing, unusual in British productions) is simply to preserve their carefully-chosen meanings for an Anglophone audience. To leave them in Russian in an English-speaking production is to make strange that which Chekhov intended ordinary. Most are simple translations of the Russian: Ivan, for example, becomes John (his mother calls him ‘Jean’ in French in the Russian too) and his reductive nickname, Vanya, is Johnny. The exception is Telegin, whose name derives from the Russian telega, a twowheeled cart: he becomes Cartwright. Most revealing of all is the literal translation of the Russian name Vera (Petrovna, Sonya’s mother), the character dead before the play begins: Faith.
A note on the text
A forward slash ( / ) marks the point of interruption of overlapping dialogue.
A comma on a separate line ( , ) indicates a pause, a rest, a silence, an upbeat or a lift. Length and intensity are context dependent.
An ellipsis (…) indicates a trailing off.
Square brackets [like this] indicates words which are part of the intention of the line but which are not spoken aloud.
This text went to press before the production opened and so may differ slightly from what was performed.