Chekhov

Straddling broad comedy and genuine pathos, Uncle Vanya, first produced in 1899, is a very tricky play indeed. The main characters are mostly puffed up with delusion and fuelled by romantic fantasy. They use mordant self-deprecation alongside flights of fancy to express their dissatisfaction with their lot. The play encourages the audience to laugh at the evident gap between these characters’ vaulting sense of how special their lives ought to be relative to their actual lives of middling privilege, conducted in middling places. 

Anxiety and agitation failing to translate into action as an exhausted and exhausting world faces an uncertain future – the contemporary relevance of The Cherry Orchard requires no special pleading. Retaining the characters and narrative trajectory of the play written by Anton Chekhov in 1903, Australian director Benedict Andrews employs music and contemporary diction in an ambitious production that takes the humour in Chekhov’s final play seriously.

The setting is a country property somewhere in parched wheatbelt Australia. It is a four-hour drive from the city, with patchy phone reception. In Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, the character’s names remain the same, but we find Irina, Constantin, and Boris et al. in twenty-first-century Australia, dealing with mozzies and moaning about the internet, or lack thereof.