Word: vanya
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Michael Gambon is one of the best, though American audiences have seen little of him. Acclaimed for his work in everything from Uncle Vanya to several of Alan Ayckbourn's most provocative comedies (A Chorus of Disapproval, Man of the Moment), Gambon is known here mainly as the star of Dennis Potter's admired TV mini-series, The Singing Detective. Now he's making his long-overdue U.S. stage debut, in a Broadway production of David Hare's Skylight. All the ingredients are there for stage magic; unfortunately, too many of the wires and trapdoors are clearly visible...
Long before Chekhov ever wrote his classic plays The Seagull. The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya and sometime after he had established himself as a brilliant story writer for magazines, he wrote a few short comic pieces for the stage. He called them "vaudevilles," though none actually incorporated musical theater. Their designation rested on their qualification as grotesque caricatures of the absurd...
Unfortunately, the new Broadway production is an ice crystal gone a little soft at the edges. Courtenay, a veteran British stage performer probably best known here for his film roles (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; Dr. Zhivago), offers a Vanya of precise but wistful enunciations, interspersed with moments of careening grandeur. But the rest of the cast is weak. Gerry Bamman overacts as the bankrupt landowner Telyegin. Amanda Donohoe (formerly of L.A. Law) looks lovely as the irresistible beauty Yelena but fails to wring any pathos from her realization that in life she has "always played a minor...
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...
Perhaps it is this hint of the ideal that accounts for Vanya's continuing attraction. Even if nothing much happens onstage, everything is happening on that other, imagined stage-a world of fulfilled passions, where scholarship leads to wisdom, industry to affluence, sexual desire to spiritual communion. Chekhov's impulse is transcendent. At his best he evokes an ethereal theater where angels perform in front of angels...