Off-Broadway Review: Vanya

Alone…and Adrift in the World

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE

No one will dispute that Andrew Scott is a fine actor. In fact, he may be one the best actors of our time. His range, sensitivity, and ability to play light comedy and darker menace have carried him through a variety of hits on stage and screen. To home viewers, he’s probably best known for roles in Fleabag, Sherlock, and Ripley. He became somewhat an LGBTQ+ heartthrob in last year’s All of Us Strangers as the emotionally conflicted gay man.

All that range is fully on display in Vanya now at the Lortel in Manhattan.  Scott and co-creators Simon Stephens and Sam Yates have given themselves the daunting task of reimagining Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya as a solo show with Scott playing all the parts. As theatrical undertakings go, it is an impressive tour de force, and Scott will likely scoop up nominations for every conceivable Off-Broadway award for a solo show. To be sure, he is impressive to watch, and if he sometimes relies on obvious mannerisms or reliance on props (mostly a cigarette, sunglasses, or a gold chain around his neck he fiddles with) to distinguish the characters, he nonetheless inhabits each of them with focus and precision. It is certainly a triumph for the actor, and fans of Scott should do what they can to see this before it leaves town. Seats, however, are at a premium, and the sightlines at the Lortel can be frustrating. (Why they can’t raise the stage six inches always baffles me since that would allow the bulk of the audience to see the full actor. It would be worth the investment and bedevils every production there.)

All that said, while Vanya may be an impressive feat theatrically, Chekhov doesn’t fare quite so well. However impressive Scott’s rendition of the characters, what a solo performance simply cannot do is fully create the world of the play.

In Chekhov, and Uncle Vanya particularly, the full power of the play can only be felt by an audience entering the world of the country house where Vanya (Here renamed Ivan, and all the character’s names have been modernized with western equivalents) has been a caretaker, working for 25 years to support the estate and keep his pompous brother-in-law Michael (here a fading filmmaker rather than a scholar) living large. Ivan and Sonia, Michael’s daughter and Ivan’s niece, struggle to make the estate work. There is also a doctor, bored with his country life, Helena, Michael’s second wife, Ivan’s mother Elizabeth and Maureen the housekeeper. In a conventional production—and indeed as the original play is written—it is only through the interaction of these characters, the pauses, the reactions, the obvious hurts and wishes for joy, that we understand this world.

This is a play about loss, lost love, impossible love, staring down the face of life’s futility, and managing to go on no matter what. As Scott has to switch from character to character so quickly, what’s missing is the atmosphere, what happens to the characters and in their world between the lines.

While we feel the individual characters’ pain to a degree, there is no time for the emotion and the feelings to sink in. One of the elements of the original is that in a good production, one feels how the world is changing, how estates are being sold off (same as in The Cherry Orchard) to make way for a new, rising middle class. Through Alexander, we see Chekhov’s loathing of poshlost, a Russian word that means banality, vulgarity, shallowness, though it has no direct translation because it also implies a callous immorality. It’s a trait that shows up in many characters in his plays and short stories, and these insensitive creatures are some of Chekhov’s worst villains. In this production, we are robbed of seeing Alexander’s impact on everyone else, and it blunts the final few moments of the play when Ivan and Sonia alone at last simply continue as they were before. Chekhov’s searing criticism of humanity and the world is lost in this production.

It’s hard to imagine how someone could follow this adaptation without knowing the original play. Of course, that may be an asset as well to an audience, who simply relates to what’s in front of them. In this case, what’s in front of them is a superlative actor bringing a series of characters to life and giving us fleeting glimpses if not a broad view.

It’s a bold choice and one to be admired for what it is. I suppose you’ll have to look elsewhere for your classic Chekhov.

Vanya
Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher Street
Weds, Fri, 7 p.m.; Thurs, Sat 2 p.m.; & 7 p.m.; Sun 2 p.m.
$399-$499 vanyaonstage.com
95 minutes, no intermission

Production Photos by Julia Cervantes
Published March 17, 2025