Word: astrov
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...Astrov, the troubled, drink-prone doctor in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, asks, "Those who will live a hundred ... years after us, for whom we are struggling now to beat out a road, will they remember and say a good word for us?" Those 100 years are nearly up. The play was first published 98 years ago, when Chekhov was 37 and already ailing with the consumption that would kill him seven years later. He feared that he would soon be forgotten, but today Chekhov--and particularly Uncle Vanya--seems to be everywhere...
...fails to wring any pathos from her realization that in life she has "always played a minor role." As the professor, Werner Klemperer produces a small fool when we long for a big one-there's a panoramic sweep missing in his windy fatuities. James Fox is competent as Astrov, and at times genuinely moving, but here too we hunger for something larger. Astrov is a feckless visionary obsessed with the future; in Fox's controlled performance we miss the simultaneous brightness and vacancy of eye that belong to the incurable schemer and dreamer...
...Astrov's obsession is just one aspect of the play's preoccupation with time. His medical training encourages him to see the world as his patient. The prognosis is grim: Russia's forests are being stripped, its fauna decimated, its rivers defiled. But in Vanya's eyes, time is static. Boredom, frustration, tedium will reign eternally. The choice these two philosophers contrive is desolate: the world is going to hell, or it's already there...
Michael Cantor has chosen to underplay Astrov, delivering his lines in a folksy singsong while shaking his head and making perfunctory gestures like a small-town defense attorney, or, for that matter, our next president. This anti-declamatory approach works well from time to time, and some of Cantor's readings display wit and intelligence. But it also allows him to skip lightly over the surface of the part, taking at face value Astrov's assertion that he can no longer feel anything. Astrov feels things very deeply--his preoccupation with animals and the forests reveals a profound humanitarian urge...
...When Dr. Astrov speaks of the ravaged soil of Russia, he means his ravaged soul as well, but Bedford delivers the lines like an ad campaigner against environmental pollution. Henry's Elena is a femme fatale of provocative dimensions, but she moves with a languor that confuses sensuality with sedation. If purity of spirit can burn away the dross of circumstance, then Maraden's Sonya is a quenchless flame, albeit a small...