Review: Dear Uncle ****

You can feel the audience waiting. They are tense, expecting the scene or stage vignette that will bring a belly laugh – The Ayckbourn Roar, critic Paul Allen labelled it.

And then you feel them become confused as it never transpires. Eventually it clicks that Ayckbourn will not be providing the belly laughs tonight. Instead, he will slowly crank up the intensity in his version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya so far that the human souls on stage come under ever sharper scrutiny at the business end of his microscope. It is their utter tragedy that is deeply comic – in a slow, excruciating way.

Vanya is a piece that has been done and redone and Ayckbourn is the latest to put his stamp on the Russian’s work. It is quite something to see how Chekhov’s plot, with its story of the manners of a household upset and unbalanced, could easily have been an Ayckbourn original.

Vanya becomes Marcus who runs the estate that belonged to his late sister and where her husband, Sir Cedric Savidge, now lives with their daughter and his new young wife.

As Marcus, the polite, put upon keeper of the estate, Matthew Cottle could have been born to play an Ayckbourn comic foil. His sheer bafflement at the world around him is so perfectly played and his despair at his own ineptitude, when he fails to shoot infuriating bore Sir Cedric is the most hilariously tragic moment of all.

Ayckbourn turns the story of people unhappily trapped in their lives into an intense and funny – thought not laugh out loud – show.

To September 30.