- The Guardian Saturday 3 August 2019
52The week
in culture
Last year, Rupert Everett gave
a heart-wrenching performance in
The Happy Prince , a fi lm about the
elderly Oscar Wilde in which he
played the writer not as a predictably
witty dandy but as a tragic fi gure
stuttering towards the end of his life.
Here, making his debut directing
for the stage, Everett approaches
Uncle Vanya with a similarly
counterintuitive touch. Chekhov
wrote the play as a comedy, Everett
told the Guardian recently , and
while his is not the fi rst to draw out
the absurdist elements of this fi n-
de-siècle masterpiece about midlife
malaise, few productions have gone
as far as this daringly jaunty one –
newly adapted by David Hare.
Much of the comedy is delivered
by Everett himself, who gives
a fl amboyant performance as
a louche, growly Vanya, wandering
around barefoot and eking out
pained humour from lines as
lugubrious as: “It’s a perfect day
to hang yourself.”
Not all the performances,
however, attest to the play’s
outright success as a comedy.
Richard Roxburgh , who played
Vanya opposite Cate Blanchett in
the Sydney Theatre Company’s
acclaimed 2012 production, likened
it to a Noël Coward play without
the jokes, and it feels occasionally
thus in this production. Some actors- particularly John Light as the
defeated Dr Astrov and Clémence
Poésy as Yelena , the beautiful, bored
wife of the elderly professor – seem
to be playing it straight, which grates
against the comic elements.
But the tonal inconsistencies are
ironed out, so that the depression
and despair is balanced by bursts
of farce and bathos. Katherine
Parkinson steers brilliantly between
humour and torment as Vanya’s
plain niece, Sonya , and is winningly
dorky around Astrov, for whom she
harbours a passion. Parkinson’s shift
to pathos, when Sonya’s love is not
returned, is pitch perfect. Meanwhile,
the small part of the nursemaid,
Marina , is made big with characterful
humour in Ann Mitchell’s hands.
Not everything works seamlessly:
Yelena, who sparks much of the
play’s emotional turbulence, is
played with elegant restraint by
Poésy, but her relationship to the
professor is neglected. Light is a
lik able misanthrope as Dr Astrov,
and we feel his despair as a medic,
while disease and death are rising
in the peasant population around
him. But his interest in trees and
reforestation as an alternative way
to save humanity is turned rather
too heavy handedly into a climate-
change message in Hare’s script.
By the second half, the comedy
begins to glitter and gleam against
the Chekhovian darkness. The
pressure-cooker blend of boredom,
disappointment and simmering
anger reaches boiling point as
the cast languish in the Russian
countryside, barricaded by their
bourgeois privilege against the
pestilence and poverty of the
peasants who surround them.
The scene of Dr Astrov’s stolen
kiss with Yelena, when it comes,
is a powerful one, set against the
tragicomedy of Vanya’s own fast-
wilting romantic hopes. When
the fi nal eruption of high passion
arrives, during his murderous
attempts on the professor’s life,
there is a perfect meeting of tragedy
and comedy.
Charles Quiggin ’s set draws out
and deepens the romantic strains
of the script in subtle, visual ways,
capturing the seasons with the
sounds of birds, the swish of wind
against foliage, the hues of autumnal
or spring light. The cast, too, form
melancholy stage tableaux at times,
sitting in beautiful formations that
hint at psychological states. The
play may be set in turn-of-the-20th-
century Russia, but in these moments
they appear like fi gures from an
Edward Hopper painting, bearing all
the loneliness of the modern age.
Arifa AkbarWhat others said
“Everett initially presents
himself as a faintly Withnail-y
presence ... But this playfulness
rarely resurfaces.”
Natasha Tripney The Stage“It’s called Uncle Vanya, but here
it should be called Niece Sonya, as
Katherine Parkinson steals the show.”
Daisie Bowie-Sell WhatsOnStage.com“Certain words just jar in this
adaptation. Surely no one gives
anyone a ‘cuddle’ in Chekhov?”
Ann Treneman The Times▲ Louche and growly ... Rupert
Everett in Uncle Vanya
PHOTOGRAPH: NOBBY CLARKTheatre
Uncle Vanya
Theatre Royal, Bath
★★★★☆
Rupert Everett
fi nds the
funny in
Chekhov
Last year, the Danish fi lm-maker
Isabella Eklöf made a fi erce
impression on international
audiences with her script for the
transgressive body-horror romance
Border. Now, British audiences can
see her directorial debut Holiday ,
an icily accomplished drama about
sexual violence, toxic masculinity
and toxic femininity, in a Euro-
hardcore style not dissimilar to the
manner of shock veterans such as
Ulrich Seidl or Gaspar Noé.
Victoria Carmen Sonne gives a
horribly convincing and mesmerically
uncomfortable performance as
Sascha, a young woman in skimpy
swimwear who is the abused trophy
girlfriend of Michael (Lai Yde), a gang
boss who presides over a cringing
court of mob lieutenants and their
various mums and kids, on a grisly
holiday at the luxury apartment
complex he has built in the Turkish
resort of Bodrum as a front for his
drugs business. With the glittering
waters of the ocean and the Hockney
blue of the infi nity pools around
which young women are expected to
dance decorative attendance on fatter,
older, paranoid guys, this is a world
that can only be called Hate Island.
Sonne brilliantly shows Sascha’s
creepy, childlike narcissism, gazing
at her refl ection in changing room
mirrors in a celebratory stupor. She
zoom s about the place on a motor-
scooter, wearing a fl oating, trailing,
Isadora Duncan-type scarf. Her
cherubically blank face is imbued
with a scary kind of knowingness
that doesn’t really know much at all.These abuse-victim mannerisms
are gruesomely juxtaposed
by Eklöf with the menfolk’s
entitlement. Michael has the bland
complacency of what he imagines
to be alpha-male seniority, but
he prickles with insecurity and
resentment. Then there is the
yet more sinister Bobby (Yuval
Segal), another violent man with
a pterodactyl expression, who se
abusive relationship with Sascha
may or may not be known to
Michael. Free-spirited Sascha also
fl irts with Thomas (Thijs Römer),
a handsome younger guy with a
yacht – a status symbol that nettles
Michael as much as anything else.
The horror begins to impend.
The centrepiece of this fi lm is,
heartsinkingly and inevitably,
a rape that can only be watched
through your fi ngers, and is made
more brutal by the hard sunlit
sheen of the production design and
the rectilinear way the shot is set
up. Eklöf makes it clear this event
is all about male rage : it is a result
of one of his male subordinates
letting Michael down with a
serious blunder.
Has Holiday anything new to say
about rape? I’m not sure, but Eklöf
does convey the idea that violence
is internalised by the victim. In the
same way Michael’s errant male
employee becomes extravagantly,
almost puppyishly loyal, as he
dishes out apology gifts to the guys
who had beaten him up, Sascha
begins to sink further into her
mindset of sexual serfdom.
There is no doubting the verve
and style of Eklöf ’s fi lm-making- or the brutality of these people
on an open-ended holiday from
ordinary human empathy.
Peter Bradshaw
What others said
“The touchstones here are Gaspar
Noé and Michael Haneke, but Eklöf
subverts them to feminist ends ...
Love it or loathe it, you’ll certainly
talk about it.”
Ian Freer Empire“It’s hard to tell whether Eklöf intends
to communicate something genuine
about the human condition, or just
shovel hostility at her audience.”
Glenn Kenny New York TimesFilm
Holiday
Cert 18
★★★☆☆Brutal, creepy
and stylish:
welcome to
Hate Island
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