Uncle Vanya

Staging an Anton Chekhov play at the Anton Chekhov Theatre doesn’t require celebratory anniversaries. No special occasion is needed to remember Chekhov and reflect on his significance for global cultural heritage. Chekhov is always on the agenda.

“Uncle Vanya,” directed by Alexandru Kozub, is another attempt to demonstrate the striking resemblance of characters from the Russian provinces of the late 19th century to people living at the beginning of the 21st century.

“Chekhov created a play that, like plasticine, can be molded into anything. This is probably the key to its inexhaustibility. Only the accents, their dosage, and proportions are important. Alexandru Kozub chose the path of intensifying and condensing the comic register of “Uncle Vanya,” pushing the actors’ performances to the point of grotesque, caricature, and even elements of clowning…

…The contrast between the serious and the funny, the comic and the tragic, is one of the production’s main tools. The characters are downright silly when things are truly serious, and when they are serious, they’re generally funny…

There’s another technique that Alexandru Kozub successfully employs in “Uncle Vanya”: the deliberate transformation of the characters into humanoid mannequins, dolls, automated creatures that, out of nowhere, begin repeating their lines or movements (usually up to three times), like a broken mechanism where something has gone wrong, or like a broken record, where the needle monotonously and obsessively recreates the same fragment, unable to break the vicious cycle of repetition. The doll-like nature of the characters, the exaggerated portraits, and even, it seemed to me, their somewhat cartoonish voices only reinforce the sense of tragic lifelessness, self-absorption, and self-absorption of the provincial labyrinthine house and its neurotic inhabitants.”

Ivan Pilkin, writer