Uncle Vanya (Watching the woman kill herself)

This production of «Uncle Vanya» contains several puzzles, some of them being references to the director’s previous stagings. There are two moments when the actors suddenly begin to speak dialogues from Jean Gene’s «The Maids». And the set design has been borrowed from the production of «Women Dream about Horses». The sparsely used details suffice for the audience to get the sense of Chekhov’s poetics. The critics repeatedly pointed to the minimalist and even ascetic pictorial style as well as to the perfect ensemble of performers, «none of whom excels the others». The production «makes it obvious that the ideas of the classic are still perfectly up-to-date. The creative power of the director and his actors culminates in the truly Chekhovian finale that essentially becomes a dialogue between generations.
This is an enthrallingly playful performance. The energy of the actors is astounding as they take their audience on ‘a magical mystery tour’ to the art theatre. This theatre is perfectly accessible, doesn’t shun at intimacy and generously offers its entire self to the audience. It is inquisitive and provocative at the same time. In the course of the performance one can’t help becoming part of this theatre. This is a very bold adaptation of Uncle Vanya, reminding us that in the world where social ties have almost ceased to exist Chekhov is strikingly contemporary

On a patch of the scenic space the actors from Buenos Aires play Uncle Vanya very vigorously. They are fast but assiduous and their performance is full of inner content. In the absence of sentimentality and psychological details there is clean-cut interpretation of each character. They are playing neither some abstract ‘Russians’ nor people from the past. They don’t forcibly pull Chekhov up to their present-day Argentinean realities. But each of these characters’ face will stay in one’s memory for a long time.
All of them are somewhat untypical personages from Uncle Vanya’s milieu. Elena Andreyevna is rather short and wears a black dress. The “old jackdaw” Maria Vasilievna… Sonya with a flower in her hair to draw Astrov’s attention… Daniel Veroneze doesn’t seem to care about ‘realism’. The events unfold non-stop and are not split into acts. But not for one second there is doubt that all that is happening on stage is absolutely real. It seems to me that the director thought little if anything about some formal accents or symbols. But when in the last second of the performance Sonya, desperate and drained of all strength, bumps her forehead against the table the sound seems no less symbolic than that of the broken string in “The Cherry Orchard.