So Live and Laugh at It All

Review: Uncle Vanya
City Center, New York
July 28, 2012

Cate Blanchett is a woman of uncanny beauty. Her director, cast, and even husband (the translator) know it, too, judging by the Sydney Theatre Festival staging of Uncle Vanya. As she enters the stage, cloaked in a headscarf, sunglasses, and cream-white dress that evoked Grace Kelly, it's hard not to feel a little reverent. Her wardrobe and coiffed appearance announce, yes, a star who knows she's a star; but she's also considerably older than her character Yelena Serebryakova, who should be 27. Blanchett's approach to Yelena begins with careful elegance, when she comess to the estate of her retired husband's late wife. We soon see her crisp, statuesque appearance fall away into fumbling sexuality and even goofiness. These mannerisms are an artifice for Yelena, maybe trying hard to set back the clock, afraid to let loose and let go.


Director Tamás Ascher throws Blanchett onto a set caked in sweat that seems to close in more each act. The family maintaining the estate all ramble about their boredom while their lives waste away. I'd imagined Uncle Vanya would be full of the melancholy and lingering disappointment I associate with Ingmar Bergman's films. Instead, the audience laughed throughout. The cast didn't push for humor; this wasn't a Vanya for Must-See-TV at 8 p.m. But Andrew Upton's translation lets us laugh (with that laugh of understanding) at the Serebryakova family's follies. We can relate to the shame of throwing ourselves at someone and being rejected.


This isn't grand tragedy, just drama born from ennui. Blanchett moves about the house like a swan, exotic and perhaps dangerous if you get too close. She lures two men, first Uncle Vanya himself (Richard Roxburgh), who at 47 feels he has thrown away all his chances. Even his attempts to seduce Yelena are sad, and well-executed by Roxburgh, the soul of this production. Roxburgh makes his self-pity and disgust extraordinarily funny. And who could resist a shot at the virile town doctor, Astrov? The excellent Hugo Weaving is a force of life as Astrov, shaking up the boredom of this old estate, bellowing about, kissing Yelena with unanticipated suddenness. 


I wasn't sold on Hayley McElhinney's interpretation of Sonya, the professor's daughter who suffers from being not beautiful. McElhinney seemed more simple-minded than plain, and felt overshadowed by Blanchett's male stage partners. But the pleasures of my first experience with Uncle Vanya--and Chekhov in any form--were many. The Sydney mounting steps around tragedy, bypasses comedy and melodrama, and settles into a balance like life itself.