Following its closure last March, a specially commissioned film of this production, recorded in the Harold Pinter theatre in London's West End, was shown on the BBC at the end of December and remains available to stream on BBC iPlayer for the rest of 2021.
Directed by Ian Rickson and with Toby Jones in the title role, this is Chekhov done to perfection. Students for whom Stanislavski is a set practitioner will benefit enormously from seeing how this style of work can be performed at its best (though a handful of fourth-wall breaking soliloquies-to-camera break this mould, and will in themselves provide rich grounds for discussion).
Over the course of the past year, a huge variety of theatre productions have been streamed for home-viewing. In several cases, where plays were filmed originally only for archive, a single fixed-camera is the only perspective available on the production. In others, a hand-held camera has been able to follow the actors freely around the stage, reaching angles a theatre audience could never have. This film perfectly balances full-immersion in the set (the auditorium and proscenium arch are never seen, and close-ups and cut-away reaction shots focus our attention) with the theatre experience (our perspective remaining end-on, as a seated audience would see it).
There are exceptional performances from Jones, Aimee Lou Wood as his niece Sonya, and Anna Calder-Marshall as Nana, but Rickson's cast all capture beautifully the humanity and idiosyncratic flaws of Chekhov's characters – their contrasting vanities and self-awareness, their frayed confidence, or bloated over-compensation for its lack. An inevitable side-effect of the events of this year was that we also become caught up in the emotions of a family who find themselves trapped in a house together, unexpectedly, with all their usual routines and escapes denied them, driving each other mad…
There are tiny imperfections: a fire-door which is unfortunately prominent within the set for many of the close-ups, and a costume which feels strangely modern and out-of-step with the period all other characters are set in; but the real triumph of this production is its humour – too little found in renditions of his works since Chekhov himself declared them to be comedies, this one had me laughing repeatedly aloud, while also profoundly moved by an ending which faces head-on the sense of futility we all experience a few times in life, and which many have encountered more than ever in the past year.
Uncle Vanya is available to stream on www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer for 11 more months.