Andrew Scott Alone Is More Than Enough in ‘Vanya’

“I just want you to look at me,” says a man named Ivan to a woman named Helena at the end of the first act of Vanya, Simon Stephens’s new adaptation of Chekhov’s 1897 tale of thwarted desire and gnawing discontent in the Russian countryside. “That’s all I want,” Ivan continues as Helena looks on, eyebrow slightly arched, one arm delicately crossed across her body, one hand always toying with her necklace. “That’s all I need.”

You can see them both—as well as the disenchanted doctor, Michael, fidgeting with a tennis ball; and Ivan’s niece, long-suffering Sonya, cleaning up everyone’s messes; and Sonya’s father, Helena’s husband Alexander, an aging filmmaker pining for his glory days—but like possessive spirits, they all inhabit only one body. This Vanya arrives from London where its solo performer, the very busy Andrew Scott, became the first person to win Critics Circle awards for best actor in both theater and film (for All of Us Strangers) in the same year. The production, directed by Sam Yates and designed by Rosanna Vize (movingly, they also share co-creator credits with Scott and Stephens), racked up plenty of its own accolades — and though shows beloved on one side of the Atlantic don’t always stick the landing on the other, this one vaults across with wit and grace.

To its creators’ great credit, the show’s form registers not as a celebrity stunt—or even, whatever the reality, as one of the many solo performances producers have gravitated toward in the era of COVID-altered theater—but as an intimate and sincere actor’s laboratory, a chance to turn one of Chekhov’s rangy, yearning ensembles into a kind of revelatory Russian doll, messing about with his inimitable voice in order to channel it to thrilling effect. Because what makes this Vanya sing is that we don’t simply witness Scott’s virtuosity but, through him and through Stephens’s cleverly spare adaptation, Chekhov’s.

Stephens mercifully avoids getting too on-the-nose in terms of time and place (minus one very funny reference to Reykjavík), and at the same time, he, a British-Irish playwright, and Scott, an Irish actor elegantly mine the overlap between the Russian and Irish psyches. The echoes are both poignant and droll: This is village culture, gabbing and drinking culture, with a genetic affinity for the absurd and a veneer of wry resignation atop a volcanic bedrock of existential turmoil. Waffles—one of Chekhov’s priceless weirdos, a hard-up neighbor who’s always hanging around on the estate that Vanya manages for Alexander—here becomes Liam, and we instantly recognize him as that guy in the village. Scott’s malleable body folds inward and his accent broadens as he fiddles with a little tapedeck (in Chekhov’s original, Waffles often plays guitar). “Where’d you come from?” says Ivan the first time Liam speaks. “Oh, I’ve been here the whole time,” replies Liam guilelessly. It’s a joke that earns an extra laugh when everyone lives in the same body, but it’s also true to the source: Poor, loyal Waffles is always there and constantly forgotten.

At the same time, Scott’s act of mass ventriloquism—patient, playful, physically astute and ultimately brave—clarifies something at the heart of Chekhov’s play. It’s that simple confession by Ivan: “I just want you to look at me.” It could be an actor speaking, admitting to the primal need that undergirds the profession — and indeed, Vize styles the broad stage at the Lucille Lortel like a rehearsal room, mismatched chairs and fluorescent lights, a tea and coffee station with a sink and a mini-fridge, a long mirror covered by a curtain, a free-standing wooden door, a card table with a prop bottle of vodka. Scott makes his first entrance casually, carrying a water bottle and ambling to the sink where he calmly makes himself a cup of tea and lights a cigarette. He gives us a look, and mischief creeps into his face as he starts to play with the light switches on the wall. Then, with a flick, he leaves us in the dark. “Have some tea, Michael,” he says, taking a drag on the cigarette as the old nanny Maureen. (The production’s Hibernian melodies and Scott’s own aptitude for archness render this character, who’s got the potential to come off a little soppy, wonderfully brisk and bright).

Perhaps we’re watching an actor who’s arrived before rehearsal, or one who’s hung around after, delaying the return to the real world, where figuring out who you are is a daily shambles and people are more likely to look down and hurry past than to pause and meet your eyes. All of Chekhov’s characters long to be seen: “I hate getting old,” growls the anxious, vain Alexander, in a scene that Stephens, Yates, and Scott render with particular sympathy. “I’m so old now I’ve started to disgust myself … I want my old life back. The… the success. The fame. And the… attention.” Meanwhile, Alexander’s daughter Sonya yearns for one glance from the doctor, Michael. “I’ve loved him for six years,” she confesses to the beautiful, aloof Helena. “Even the dogs know I love him … he doesn’t even see me!” And though Helena herself may have lived a life with too many goggling gazes on her, she still isn’t as immune to the risky desire for total exposure before another soul as she thinks she is.

Scott, with his suddenly unblinking gaze and his rippling, androgynous energy, is a fearlessly sensual actor, and without showiness, he manages to generate unnerving levels of heat between two characters inside one body. I’m usually allergic to explicit sex scenes on stage, so when Yates and Scott decided to take two different encounters between Helena and Michael all the way around the bases, it struck me as a minor miracle that the effect was somehow riveting, disconcerting, and deeply tender. A touch masturbatory? Definitely — but there’s a mournful resonance to that in a play where characters reach out so desperately and remain so trapped within themselves.

And what of the most desperate among them? In a touch that feels marvelously true to Chekhov, Scott turns Ivan—given the affectionate diminutive “Vanya” only once in this production, by Maureen—into a chaotic, tormented clown. He carries a handheld foley device and is fond of deploying rounds of recorded applause, snatches of laughtrack, or cartoonish sound effects on his entrances, or to weasel his way out of more vulnerable moments inside of scenes. Why answer a hard question or admit to how much you’re suffering when you could dance away to the sound of a whoopee cushion? In this Vanya, Ivan’s first appearance injects the play’s tricky opening—a heavy summer afternoon that can easily turn meandering and languorous—with a much-needed electrical current. While American Vanyas all too often enter the stage already beaten, dragging their feet, slumping and sighing, Scott’s bounces and twitches, holding forth with the brassy sarcasm and barely suppressed mania of a man who’s much closer to the edge than anyone wants to admit. Start without some frantic, thrashing grip on life and you preemptively flatten Vanya’s climactic Act Three breakdown: “I haven’t lived,” he gasps like a fish on the riverbank. “I haven’t. I’ve wasted my life. I wasted it! I wasted away. The things I could have done, and I just didn’t. I’m talented … I’m intelligent. I’m brave … What should I do?” Then, offered sympathy by no one—and here, simply alone on stage, abandoned by default, railing into the abyss—he makes the same terrifying about-face that repeatedly precedes a man picking up a gun: “No, I know what I’m going to do. You won’t forget me.”

Distinctively, and, it turns out, smartly, Stephens makes the textual decision to play down Ivan’s obsession with the gorgeous Helena. It’s usually a defining feature of Vanyas — his reckless, bathetic declarations of devotion as she bats him away. “I love you. You’re my life, my happiness, my youth!” says Vanya in a popular American translation. “All I want is to see you, hear your voice…” But Stephens inverts the sentiment: See you becomes see me, and the choice is a potent one. It draws out the essential truth of the circumstances Chekhov created, which is that Vanya’s love is no more substantive than Alexander’s constant, panicked summonings of the doctor — their suffering is real, but the form it’s taking is a kind of performance, a definable container for a lifetime of frustrated, ineffable desires. Ivan, like an unwatered plant or like a lonely actor, longs for the life-giving gift of attention. His eternal irony is that he will get it and get it and get it—and in performances like Scott’s, he will earn every second of it—but he’ll never know that we’re all out here in the dark, rapt, still watching.

Vanya is at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through May 11.