I went to see a National Theatre Live screening of Simon Stephens’ Vanya a few days ago because Stephens’ production of the Chekhov classic was marketed as a “one-man adaptation which explores the complexities of human emotion”, which, as a description, was good enough for me. (What is drama if not an exploration of the complexities of human emotion?) As I’d never seen a one-man show before and had always associated them strongly with farce, I was intellectually curious to see what it would be like to actually experience somebody play every character in a play for a few hours, but I was much more interested to see what Stephens’ choice to stage the play this way would do for how the story was told and how we the audience would relate to it as a result. 

Like many others, I’ve been a fan of Andrew Scott since seeing his performance as everybody’s favourite fictional brooding Danish prince. It seems humans with complex emotions and familial problems are his thing, indeed, because I walked out of the cinema thinking no performance merited the praise it received more than his in Vanya. I’m no actor but I imagine it’s no mean feat to bring eight quite distinct characters to life in the way he did. His use of his body in particularto create those shades of difference between one character and the next in a single conversation really blew me away, the scenes where Helena and Ivan converse on the swing, Sonja and Michael’s ‘midnight feast’ where she coaxes him out of alcoholism and Sonja talking Ivan out of suicide being really memorable ones. Although at times it was difficult to know who exactly was speaking, especially in those quippy moments, I don’t think this had anything to do with Scott’s performance as much as it was what I imagine is a natural by-product of one-man shows. 

The play, or the version of the play that I saw, is about unrequited love, the pain of unrealised potential, the aftermath of disillusionment, grief, and longing. In these ways it reminded me very much of Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman and in Ivan I saw Willy and Biff all at once. I know the one-man show format was seen as gratuitous by some and Arifa Akbar, writing for The Guardian, felt that the format ‘did not allow Scott to penetrate any one part deeply not devastatingly enough for the tragedy to be truly felt by the end’, but I thought the format worked greatly in the favour of the play’s themes of conflicting desires and Ivan’s desperation for personhood.¹ While following which character was speaking wasn’t always the easiest as I’ve already said, I found the tragedy quite palpable at the end because of the fragmentation of thought created by Scott’s playing all eight characters, not in spite of it. 

I wasn’t familiar with the play’s story going into the screening but it quickly became apparent that unrealised potential was a big theme. The smatterings we got of Ivan throughout the play showed him to be someone burdened by longing, not just for Helena, the new wife of his much-detested brother-in-law, but most importantly for a sense of purpose and self as we see in his breakdown at the end of the play. All of his cynicism and dry humour is revealed to have been masking (not very well, but maybe I’ve just seen one too many explorations of complex human emotions) a great sense of longing, regret and bitterness for not having realised his dreams, for which he blames Alexander. As Ivan screamed at Alexander for having stolen his youth from him and began to consider all the things he could have done with himself, Scott’s delivery of Ivan’s “I’m intelligent” towards the end of his rant was of a man trying to convince himself of something he is not sure of. The pain of not even being certain of your own attributes anymore because you’ve lost so much of yourself to something you never wanted (financially supporting your dead sister’s husband on a potato farm while he tries to write a new film, for example) was acted so well, and I felt Ivan’s plight so deeply, having gone along with (but awaiting the inevitable collapse of) the front of coolness he had put on for the last hour or so, that I felt uncomfortable looking at the screen. 

I thought Scott’s performance also showed really well the relationship between love and hate because despite his idolisation of Alexander being presented as thing of the past — a mistake borne out of youthful ignorance —even in his annoyance about Alexander’s three honorary doctorates (undeserved in his view), his bitter comments about Alexander having never written anything original, being old, having a living wife too young and too pretty for him, and a dead wife who was too young and too pretty for him, even in his rage at the end which culminates in his twice failed attempt to kill Alexander, Ivan’s posture towards Alexander throughout the play is still tinged with a kind of twisted admiration. Perhaps the contradiction of disillusionment is that, of the person you’ve now seen for who they truly are, the version that lives on in your head is the idolised one, which is maybe why Ivan misses twice. 

That of the two main female characters, one was essentially a persona non grata that all the men still in possession of their faculties tripped over themselves to have an audience with, and the other was a kind but plain twenty-something who did a lot of emotional labour for men who weren’t all that nice to her feels about right for a nineteenth century Russian play. Final thoughts: I liked it a lot, I thought it was very impactful as a one-man show and enjoyed Sam Yates’ directing, I’m an even bigger Andrew Scott fan now, and I’d like to read Chekhov’s play. 

1. Arifa Akbar, ‘Vanya review – Andrew Scott excels in one-man Chekhov’, The Guardian, <Vanya review – Andrew Scott excels in one-man Chekhov | Stage | The Guardian>.
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