Word: serebriakov
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...actors frequently shout to be heard, which serves to exaggerate the difference in age between them and their roles. Ralph Zito turns the twisted, self-centered Serebriakov into a buoyant, strapping cartoon villain. When Vanya charges him with ruining his life in their third-act confrontation, Zito rushes across the platforms to the other side of the house, breathing heavily and staring over the audience like a character in melodrama who can't face the awful truth. But the horror of Serebriakov is that he is too full of himself to begin to understand what Vanya is talking about. Instead...
...ensemble feeling: just because the characters don't connect doesn't mean the actors can't play off each other. Thus, the third act upheaval doesn't build to anything, the actors standing around listlessly between histrionics. The storm, of course, is brought in by the arrival of Serebriakov and Elena, and foreshadows the emotional storm in the third act; but when the rain is abruptly turned off after the two depart it cheapens a very subtle metaphor. And I confess I don't really understand the point of the jazz music that is played at the beginning...
...other master stroke by which Chekhov gets the audience to be his collaborator lies in his intuitive understanding that the only undying love is unrequited love. In Uncle Vanya, Vanya (William Hutt) is desperately smitten with Elena (Martha Henry), wife of the crabbed Professor Serebriakov (Max Helpmann), who is many years her senior. Not out of any binding moral scruples, Elena treats Vanya's advances with lacerating indifference. Sonya (Marti Maraden), Vanya's niece, has adored Dr. Astrov (Brian Bedford) for six years, and he has never been aware of it for six seconds. Astrov in turn lusts...
...simmering minihell of incessantly frustrated emotions in a barren provincial outpost of non-civilization, this particular cast stirs up only a tempest in a samovar. Vanya should be compacted of anguish; Hutt is merely consumed by pique. When he shoots at Serebriakov and misses him twice, one hears only the toy pistol retort of a toyed-with emotion...
Richard Smithies plays Serebriakov with so much force and nearly boisterous gusto that even his admirable technical skill and control of such details as his hands, could not quite create a convincing aged man. The contrast to the rather pale followers who inevitably surrounded him made his polished performance slightly too heavy for the play, although he succeeded completely in any comic passages. Mij Gohr, playing his wife, was sensitive and graceful, giving a quiet impression of sensitive acting; she was also, however, a bit frozen. As Sonia, Charlotte Clark looked believable, but stood rather rigidly, often in awkward closeness...