Vanya Off-Broadway Reviews

What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.

Olivier Award winner Scott takes great care to assign a distinct voice and defining mannerisms to each role: Sonia carries a kitchen cloth; the housekeeper, Marina, stands at the kitchen counter, dragging on a cigarette; Helena sounds distracted and breathy, fiddling with her slinky gold necklace as she speaks. Michael is deeply serious, and for some reason likes to play with a tennis ball. All it takes for Scott to slip in and out of each character is a turn, or a walk behind a door. He’s a marvel.

The playwright, director Sam Yates, and scenic designer Rosanna Vize are credited along with the actor as co-creators of the production. Their fine contributions, plus James Farncombe’s shadowy and strategic lighting design, provide for a seamless staging that showcases Scott’s virtuosity. While Vanya ultimately turns out to be more about Andrew Scott’s performance than Anton Chekhov’s drama, it is unlikely that most spectators will mind.

Andrew Scott is rarely lugubrious, and never stilted in the roles. He’s sometimes riveting. He is almost always busy. Busy changing voices and accents, bouncing a tennis ball, taking on and off hip sunglasses, playing a piano, jumping on and off a swing, smoking and not smoking, drinking an entire bottle of vodka, shooting a rifle.

Juggling characters can often look frantic onstage, but it doesn’t in Vanya. Nothing about Scott’s performance feels hurried; he is unafraid of long silences, like the ones between Michael and Helena that practically heave with the heat of what they can’t say. In that sense, it is of a piece with the use of negative space in Rosanna Vize’s set.

Simon Stephen's adaptation plays up every possible bit of comedy in Vanya — an approach that could make the play hokey in the hands of a less skilled actor — but as the show progresses, the laughs get sparser and more hesitant as the characters reach their breaking points and, perhaps, so does the performer. By the time Scott, as Ivan's innocent niece Sonia, delivers the pensive final monologue, it's as if he's actually stripped all nine characters away and is simply thinking out loud to us.

Simon Stephens’ adaptation here resembles a Cliffs Notes version of Uncle Vanya where several pages have been torn out, most of those featuring the title character now gone.

To its creators’ great credit, the show’s form registers not as a celebrity stunt—or even, whatever the reality, as one of the many solo performances producers have gravitated toward in the era of COVID-altered theater—but as an intimate and sincere actor’s laboratory, a chance to turn one of Chekhov’s rangy, yearning ensembles into a kind of revelatory Russian doll, messing about with his inimitable voice in order to channel it to thrilling effect.