Trevor Nunn directed his first play the year The Beatles released their first single, and if you’re expecting the 84-year-old former NT and RSC boss to reinvent the wheel in the seventh decade of his career you have lost your mind.
Exhibit A: there is a samovar onstage from the get-go in his Orange Tree debut. This is not unreasonable: the text of ‘Uncle Vanya’ does nominally call for it. But for younger, hipper directors, dicking around with ornate Russian tea urns is a distraction: in last year’s superb, extremely un-trad Andrew Scott-starring one-man take ‘Vanya’, there was just a crappy plastic kettle.
That’s not how Sir Trev rolls, though: it’s period dress, crisp English accents and a big honking samovar, Chekhov done as ‘authentically Russian’ in the way that literally only the British actually do.
In that sense it feels critic-proof: what meaningful criticism do I have to offer Nunn’s ‘Vanya’ when it was obvious it was going to be exactly like this? Nunn is no longer the British mainstream, just an old guy too in love with theatre to retire. And why should he? This is exactly the thing the Orange Tree’s famously silvery core audience is into: there is a lot of rueful laughter when James Lance’s title character says he hopes he’ll be dead by 60. The fact it’s the only one of Chekhov’s great works Nunn’s never directed feels like reason enough. He’s gotta collect ’em all!
Anyway: it’s not as good as the Scott ‘Vanya’ or the Rickson one or the Icke one, but that’s not so much because there’s anything wrong with it, simply that it doesn’t feel like Nunn is bringing anything new to the table. The cast is solid, and ‘Ted Lasso’ star Lance is particularly good. A funny, boisterous take on the character – and with a lil’ estuary lisp, the only cast member to rock a slightly different accent – his sitcom-style line readings are palpably more modern than anybody else’s. It might annoy some people but I think it works well. Sometimes Vanya can feel like an eccentric, unchanging spirit of the estate on which the play is set. Here you can sense his happier, more vibrant past: when he regrets not having been interested in Lily Sacofsky’s radiant Elena ten years ago, you can visualise him as a lairy, gregarious thirtysomething, and feel how he enjoyed his youth so much he let it slip away in a blur.
Otherwise there’s no particular USP here beyond the Orange Tree’s innate intimacy and arguably the novelty of a Vanya this trad in 2024. But whatever: it’s still poignant and piercing, one of the greatest plays ever written. Nunn has earned the right to do what he wants. And if it means we get more of Lance on stage, then I’m all for it.