Uncle Actor
- Jonathan Kalb
- Apr 4
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 5
Andrew Scott’s Vanya—a solo show in which he plays all the roles in Anton Chekhov’s classic play—is one of the most extraordinary acting performances I’ve seen. Certainly this year, maybe in my life. You could call it a stunt, as some critics have, but if that’s your emphasis, then you don’t understand much about the material. This chameleonic feat, visiting New York after an Olivier Award-winning London run, is a hilarious and moving essay on isolation and loneliness and the absurd behavioral conceits they give rise to. The show smashes actorly vanity and insecurity up against the quirky vanities and insecurities of Chekhov’s characters and holds the result up to us as a fabulously silly mirror that’s also profoundly illuminating.
Vanya is likely to work its magic more effectively on those who, like me, have seen Chekhov’s play more times than they can count. Everyone will be able to follow it, but those who know the original are bound to savor its oddities and subtleties with special relish.
The program credits three co-creators: director Sam Yates, adaptor Simon Stephens, and designer Rosanna Vize. Huzzahs to all for conceiving such a sly and smart work and giving it the efficiency and understatement it needs to shine. Scott, a heartthrob sad-sack best known as the “hot priest” in Fleabag, easily sold out the 650-seat Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End for six weeks last fall. Now Vanya is running for two months at the 295-seat Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village, which has made tickets expensive and scarce. I sympathize with those who can’t afford it, but if you have the cash and are on the fence, well, get off. Londoners would envy the chance to see it in such an intimate venue.
Vanya kicks off by admitting it’s a play. Scott walks on to a stage outfitted like a rehearsal hall—kitchenette, card table with liquor bottle, freestanding door, big moonish globe and squat pine tossed in corner (junk and landscape all at once)—and hits a wall switch timed to a lighting cue. As he does this, he grins knowingly as if to say, “Come on—share this moment of simple, wondrous fakery with me!” Over the next two intermissionless hours, he will do other stuff like that—anomalously boyish gags like pushing buttons on a sound-effects box that trigger yucks, farts and laugh tracks while playing Vanya (renamed Ivan), or doing a jubilant little skipping dance to “Entry of the Gladiators,” or waving at a piano that proceeds to play a tune on its own.
Weirdly enough, these absurd interludes feel perfectly right and vaguely magical rather than gimmicky and bathetic, because of the way the show frames Chekhov’s story as a sort of immersive experience of actor’s joy and folly. This is a play, we’re meant to understand, and it’s about play in both its sad and happy dimensions.
The story, to remind you, is about a string of calamities that occur one summer when the title character’s brother-in-law Alexander and his beautiful young wife come to stay at the rural country estate Vanya has been managing for years with his niece. Also there are a dissipated, once-handsome doctor, a feckless and mopey neighbor, a loyal old housekeeper, and a crackpot old mother—each a common Chekhovian type. What links them in this work is the nature of their self-delusions. Each is infected with a different form of melancholy or lassitude that cramps their lives in various ways. Improbably, the cramping adds up to a tragic feeling in the end.
Yates and Stephens keep the action’s time and place deliberately vague: present day-ish, somewhere in contemporary Ireland (Scott is Irish and Stephens is British-Irish). This is smart and effective. It allows Scott to make all the characters seem instantly familiar from his and our everyday experience, and helps him conjure them with breathtaking economy. His doctor Michael, for instance, is a guy who bounces a tennis ball. The niece Sonya is a gal with a red dish towel. Helena is a seductive mantrap clutching a necklace. Vanya/Ivan is a sloucher holding his gag box. All these are shortcuts, yes, but they’re just points of entry, not the sum of the characterizations.
Dressed in plain slacks and a loose-fitting, gender-neutral shirt, Scott switches between these people with as little as a tilted head or differently wrinkled brow, dashing through and around the standing door to cover transitions, but often not even bothering with that. A short walk or a shift of weight do just as well because his intentions in every case are so recognizably precise and consistent, and his evocation of everyone’s heartbreaks and life-lies is anything but glib or easy.
Stephens’s text helps enormously with the precision and fluidity, because he has trimmed the play down to essential two-person interactions as much as possible. All atmospheric cross-talk, all chatter around entrances and exits, and everything else unnecessary to establishing core personalities, misunderstandings, and conflicts, is eliminated. Scott is therefore cleared to dramatize the play’s complex plot crisis by, essentially, assembling eight different individual crises. It’s as if the play’s purpose were to show us an act of damage to a single collective soul.
Such a project does involve some simplification of the original. That’s inevitable, but who cares? Adaptations should be evaluated on their own terms, and this one blossoms precisely because of its pruned and tweaked material. Stephens’s tweaks are sharply attuned to the show’s intentions, and that includes the notes of contemporization. Alexander, for instance, has been transformed here from a pompous art professor into a conceited, has-been filmmaker, and his indolent wife Helena has become an actress. That works, because in a 2025 world it has to be believable that a young beauty like her would couple with an old fart. After all, he makes movies!
After leaving Vanya, my wife and I walked around the Village in a daze. What we’d just seen felt vaguely miraculous—the god-like creation of eight beings by one progenitor in real time, all so gossamer slight and frivolous and yet so indisputably consequential and intense. It took us an hour to feel ready to go home.
Adapted by Simon Stephens
Directed by Sam Yates
Lucille Lortel Theatre
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