A classic revisited

The last time she was in Sheffield, I asked Tamara Harvey if the world needed another version of the story she was telling.

At the time, her answer was an emphatic ‘yes’ and, after seeing her version of Pride and Prejudice, I couldn’t have agreed more.

Her updating of the Jane Austen story was vibrant and alive, it was funny and insightful and felt at the time very necessary, if only for the colourblind casting, ridiculously an element of note even in 2015.

Two years on Harvey is back in Sheffield with a retelling of Uncle Vanya. At the risk of repeating myself – do we need another version of this story?

“One of the things we have to remember,” Harvey generously takes no umbrage at the question, “is that theatre people might be familiar with the story, but lots of people who don’t go to the theatre a lot might not have seen it. We have to remember who we are making theatre for.”

She’s right, of course. Just because Uncle Vanya been done before on a number of occasions, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done again. Indeed, the play’s longevity and enduring popularity is, as Harvey suggests, prime reason for another new version.

“We are treating it as a new play that has never been done before. We’re not looking at it and saying ‘oh so and so did it this way in a production ten years ago’. We’re just looking at it as a piece of theatre.”

And what a piece of theatre.

Chekhov’s original, first staged in 1899, is almost preternaturally prescient. Dealing with a family unsure what to do with their estate and woodland, it talked about the notion of needing to preserve our countryside well over 100 years ago. It also talks about the futility of life and a deep ennui that hangs over the heroes of the story. Recognised as one of the great plays of theatre, it has drawn translations from writers spanning Ayckbourn to the one Harvey will be using in Sheffield by Peter Gill. “Vanya was one of the things that made me want to be in theatre. It’s so deep and compelling and it asks that thing we all ask ourselves sometimes which is what is it all for? It’s a story about wasted lives and that is something that speaks across generations.” In the time since she was last at Sheffield, Harvey has landed the plum job of artistic director of Theatre Clwyd. It was shortly after she was appointed that the seeds were sown for the adaptation she brings to Sheffield this week. “Working in Sheffield on Pride and Prejudice was just a joyous experience. Coming back here to rehearse Uncle Vanya was strange because it felt like coming home,” she says. “I remember the morning of my second interview for the job at Theatre Clwyd I sat with Daniel Evans (Sheffield’s former artistic director) and talked to him about it and I’ve known Robert Hastie (the current artistic director) as a colleague for 20 years now. When I got the job at Clwyd, I began talking with Robert about various ideas for things we might do together. In fact we talked about so many things that I don’t actually know whose idea it was originally to do Vanya.”

Whoever had the idea, it is a good one.

Uncle Vanya, Sheffield Studio, to November 4.

REVIEW

Uncle Vanya

sheffield studio

The problem with Vanya is that it is a drama about people who are bent at the knee by ennui – which in itself should be an inherently undramatic thing to watch.

That said, Chekhov’s play has drawn translators and directors over three different centuries now and it’s clear why: this is truly a play for the theatre animal. Writers, actors, directors, designers: they all get to stretch and flex their muscles with Vanya.

It is clearly the attraction for Tamara Harvey, responsible for painting on the bigger canvas of the Crucible theatre last time she was in Sheffield. Here she is in the Studio and the sense of getting to really put her theatre muscles into heavy duty lifting runs through the production. She surrounds her actors on all sides by the audience and oppresses them with a huge, low-hanging tree structure. The weight of the world hangs heavy on the characters.It hangs most strikingly of all on Jamie Ballard, a dishevelled Vanya from his first appearance and on his niece Sonya, played by Rosie Sheehy. Ballard is heartbreaking.

While he plays the comedy for all its worth, it feels unbearably cruel to laugh at this Vanya, so deeply are the scars of simply hauling himself through every day etched on his face.

Come the end, the fate of Sonya is so awful, it’s all you can do not to wonder how everyone isn’t going to top themselves. But on they will go. Bleak.