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Stephen Dillane
Stephen Dillane appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, November 24, 1997 |
Financial Times Tuesday September 24, 2002 THE ARTS: Praise for a beloved 'Uncle' (an excerpt) by Alastair Macaulay Simon Russell Beale comes to the role of Chekhov's 47-year-old Uncle Vanya only 12 years after he played definitively, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the 25-year-old Konstantin in The Seagull. The wonderful irony about Russell Beale is that, as Vanya (and Konstantin, and in many other roles), he is lovable even where he is unloved. His Vanya has warmth, pathos, humour, vulnerability, practical good sense, sweetness. When he loses control and runs amok with a gun, it wrings the heart. And he has the imagination that distinguishes the finest actors. London has seen first-rate Vanyas in the past 14 years - Michael Gambon, Ian McKellen, Stephen Dillane - and there have been others elsewhere (notably Wallace Shawn in Vanya on 42nd Street). I don't give Russell Beale first prize among these stars - the memory of Dillane's motionless pain in the final act of Katie Mitchell's 1998 Young Vic is still fresh in my memory... |
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Variety Monday April 27, 1998 Uncle Vanya Young Vic Theater, London by Matt Wolf LONDON A Royal Shakespeare Co.-Young Vic co-production of the Chekhov drama in two acts by Anton Chekhov in a version by David Lan. Directed by Katie Mitchell. Sets and costumes, Vicki Mortimer; lighting, Paule Constable; sound, Steff Langley; fights, Nick Hall; music director, Richard Brown. Opened April 1, 1998. Reviewed April 11. Running time: 3 HOURS. Astrov
Linus Roache There's not a birch tree in sight in Vicki Mortimer's sparsely elegant design for the new Royal Shakespeare Co.-Young Vic co-production of "Uncle Vanya," but chances are you'll he too busy wiping away tears to give that telling absence a second thought. If too many evenings of Chekhov don't see the forest for the trees, director Katie Mitchell clears away every cliche, finding instead an unblinkered, devastating truth. This stellar production -- it's on a par with the remarkable Louis Malle-Wallace Shawn film "Vanya on 42nd Street" --sets a template for Chekhov as you wish he always came across and all too rarely does: It is alive to virtually every character's contradictions, which is to say that it is alive to life itself, and one's only lasting regret is that the production can't have a longer one. Certainly, it's hard to conceive a more urgent and playable edition than David Lan's new version, based on a literal translation by Helen Rappaport. Anyone wanting their Chekhov languid and idle should prepare for a jolt. In keeping with a company whose comparative youth reanimates in every sense a potentially languorous text, Lan reminds us that this playwright's apparently indolent people constitute so many restless and anxious souls. The intermission is preceded with the simple word "no," whose bluntness typifies the evening as a whole. Small wonder that Mitchell's choice of music is no melancholic and dreamy composition but Shostakovich and Gorecki -- jittery, fevered sounds for a household on the cusp of collapse. "This household is so unhappy," Yelena (Anastasia Hille) says twice, and by evening's end, nearly everyone has echoed her in some way. A straightforward assessment or the remarks of someone prone to the dramatic? In this production, the two are inseparable, as if to suggest that to stage your despair in no way minimizes the despair itself. There's an element of the theatrical to all the estate's inhabitants, beginning with a shambolic, bearded Vanya (Stephen Dillane) who caps his furious assault on his gout-plagued former brother-in-law Serebryakov (Malcolm Sinclair) with an explosively stated (and hilarious) "bang." The visiting doctor Astrov (Linus Roache) at one point speaks of "the play (being) over," though he, too, can put aside tendencies to self-aggrandizement and embrace real longing and hurt More than ever, one witnesses a labyrinth -- the house, indeed, is characterized as a maze -- of feeling mislaid and misunderstood, in which compassion and cantankerousness are never far apart Why else would Sonya (Jo McInnes) be referred to as an "orphan," when her father is there for all to see? In this "Vanya," a," miscommunication cuts so deep that such mistakes naturally arise: She's orphaned from the love any daughter has a right to expect even as she falls for the love of the doctor, Astrov, whose bedside manner is focused elsewhere. As Sonya, McInnes begins all briskness, every bit the hard-working country girl prepared for a day's chores. But she slows her stride as the play continues in accordance with the shifting rhythms of a community forever in flux. It's the central paradox of Chekhov that inertia should seem so active, and it does so doubly here, with each character staking a claim on our affections that alters as the next appeal is made. In Dillane's remarkable performance, this Vanya is no mere Nietzsche manque; he's an angry son and desperate suitor (no wonder he quotes Hamlet), and loving uncle, sometimes all at once. The exchanges with his mother (Cherry Morris) have an unusual edge, rancor rising up as quickly as tenderness later does with Sonya. But for all his talk of entombment, the Vanya we see has enough vigor to make his fury really matter. If Oprah were around, one can imagine him voicing an eloquent and highly media-friendly denunciation not just of provincial Russia but of himself. If self-knowledge is indeed a curse, he's the walking damned. Fellow stage-turned-film talent Roache ("The Wings of the Dove") stakes his own fresh claim on a potentially over-familiar (at least in Britain) part, presenting a droll suitor alert to everything -- vodka permitting -- except the one true love in his midst. For once, Astrov's eco-friendly argument has real passion. One understands his commitment to the cause no less fully than one sympathizes with Yelena's more personal campaign not to be thought vain. Emending somewhat Julianne Moore's approach in the Malle film, Hille makes an unusually proactive Yelena; in a different context and different time, this onetime musician might have made her own hoped-for mark instead of being the not always unwitting agent of so much amorous distress. At times, Mitchell's desire for intimacy softens proceedings too much: It's fine to feel as if one's intruding on conversation, but not if you can't bear it. But mostly the evening reverberates with the tug of affection and regret found in the opening scene between Astrov and the nanny (a lovely performance from Antonia Pemberton), whose God-filled language Sonya herself seems to have inherited by the end. This "Uncle Vanya" is nearly an hour longer than most stagings of this play, and yet it speeds by, taking with it an audience sensitized to life's ongoing ache for which this fearlessly modern play and production are any theater lover's balm. |
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Daily Mail Thursday April 2, 1998 at last night's first night review by Michael Coveney Uncle Vanya by Chekhov Young Vic THE Royal Shakespeare Company is in dire need of a creative shot in the arm. This first co-production with the host theatre is just what the doctor ordered. The doctor in the masterpiece newly translated by David Lan is Astrov, the impassioned ecologist, worn down with medical work at an early age. Linus Roache, having soared on The Wings of the Dove opposite Helena Bonham-Carter, returns to the RSC and plays Astrov to near perfection. Languid and attractive without being annoying, he breaks Vanya's niece's heart and throws himself at the old professor's young wife Yelena. He does so after showing her his charts of the devastated forests, and Anastasia Hille, superb as Yelena, fidgets in embarrassment while trying to say something else. When the crunch comes, and Astrov throws himself at her, Stephen Dillane's cynical, wiped-out Vanya, the 47-year-old estate manager whose life has left him behind, arrives with his pathetic bunch of roses. As in all great theatre, scenes like this are charged with emotion in Katie Mitchell's outstandingly atmospheric and beautiful production. David Lan says the play is about a bunch of people driving each other mad. Vanya shoots the professor, twice, and misses. Last night the gun failed to fire. BANG, shouted Mr Dillane - and the scene was as strong as ever. This Vanya is at least as good as the National's close-up version a few years ago, and much more desperate. The family fixture Telegin (Tom Bowles), nicknamed Waffles, is here dubbed Pineapple and can actually play his guitar very well. And there are glorious contributions from Malcolm Sinclair as the vigorously testy old professor and Jo McInnes, scrubbed and sensible, as the niece Sonya. She and Vanya usually sit for the final scene. Here, shutting out all heartbreak and disappointment with a return to the drudgery of accounting, they are on their feet and praising God. So, in spirit at least, is the audience. |
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Sunday Times Sunday April 5, 1998 Uncle Vanya by John Peter This is a superlative production. Katie Mitchell and her actors not only understand the feelings of people in pain, their indignation, their bad temper, their flashes of black self-pity: they also understand the precise sources of pain. This is vital in Chekhov if you are to stop his plays from sliding into a generalised fog of melancholy. Stephen Dillane's Vanya carries his body like a physical burden; he has also absorbed his suffering to the point where he is nourished by it. Jo McInnes's Sonya is a strong, brisk, compact little person, efficient and decisive, infinitely moving as she laboriously puts on her wire glasses, all the more moving as she has not a touch of self-pity. What they have in common, the source of their pain, is that nobody pays them any real attention, understands what they do, sees who they really are. Linus Roache's rock-like Astrov copes with this better, but he, too, knows that people see his obsession with the environment as a harmless eccentricity. Even Serebryakov (Malcolm Sinclair), an imperious, self-important academic, very East European, could feel that his work meant nothing to anybody around him. Anastasia Hille is a fine thoroughbred Yelena, finding out what lurks under her composed exterior; but she needs to project her voice better. The action shifts gently but purposefully around the sparsely furnished stage, and pulsates with intelligence and unsentimental feeling, full of unforgettable moments. |
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Financial Times (London) Friday April 3, 1998 An immaculate ensemble Almost at no juncture in the new RSC/Young Vic production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya does anyone take centre stage; and that - like so much else about Katie Mitchell's staging - is just as things should be in Chekhov. The audience sits on four sides, and again and again eyes have to turn from this point of the stage to that. The geometries between characters are invariably asymmetrical, multi-faceted, expressive. With this playwright, all is relative. "As for myself," says Yelena in David Lan's new version of the famous play, "I'm of no importance in this story. I'm a minor character - here in my husband's house, in these love affairs, even when I play my music . . . I'm a minor character in my own life." The same might be said by every character onstage. Except that some characters - notably Yelena - become disconcertingly central to other people's lives. As Astrov says to her: "You turn up with your husband. Suddenly we all throw down whatever we're doing for the whole summer, we can think about nothing but your husband's gout and you . . . Wherever you and your husband appear, destruction follows." In this production, she is often called by the French version of her name, Hele`ne. And, listening to these lines - I write immediately after the premie`re - I begin to guess for the first time why Chekhov gave her that name: Yelena of Troy. But the intense emotions here - comedy and heartbreak are so often locked ironically together in a sentence - are hardly more telling than numerous other features: the idle conversation, the echt Chekhovian non-sequiturs, the way the characters take their tea from the samovar and drink it (none too enthusiastically), the completely absorbing portrait of the humdrum routine of country life. The poshlust , the triviality and ennui of provincial life that Chekhov knew so well how to convey, is wonderfully caught here. There is no twilight-of-the-Romanovs glamour here; the designer, Vikki Mortimer, has updated the production to the mid-20th century, and jabbing Shostakovich chamber music is played briefly between acts. Paule Constable's lighting creates one simple beauty after another, and Steff Langley perfectly judges (without overdoing) the offstage sound that so eloquently reminds us of the larger world offstage. I especially admire this production's extreme lack of theatrical contrivance: one or two exits and entrances that seem invariably in other productions to be played like operatic tirades are here rendered conversationally, even sotto voce . This would not succeed were it not for an exceptional cast. The marvellous Stephen Dillane - whose Uncle Vanya is his finest achievement to date, and who is the best Uncle Vanya I have ever seen onstage - is an actor who can convey distress, depression, pain, even mounting hysteria, with often just a thread of voice, and without moving. The anguish of his big Act Three outburst against Serebryakov is conveyed with matchless economy: each edge, or colour, in his voice, each crumpled angle of his torso, each wretched gaze of his sad dark eyes says more than the ranting fortissimi and gesticulations of several other Vanyas. And his touch is light: indeed, in the first three acts, he has mordant humour and good sense. He is frequently matched by Linus Roache as Astrov. After a slightly underpowered beginning, Roache delivers a beautifully seductive and funny account of the doctor's self-contradictory combination of irony, humour, solicitude, pessimism and energy. Anastasia Hille, who has played so many larger theatres in recent years, here fines down her technique to its most intimate (sometimes speaking too inaudibly) and gives us a Yelena of striking indecision and melancholy fretfulness. Jo McInnes catches Sonya's paradoxical blend of misery and optimism with very touching simplicity; her softest cry of "Nanny" near the climax of Act Three is heart-catching. The whole cast plays in immaculate ensemble. At the very end, Mitchell does place Vanya centre stage, and almost all he does is listen. Sonya speaks to him of hope and the future; and the determined lyricism of her speech keeps washing over him as he listens in unmoving misery. His mother, to one side, writes at her desk; their nanny knits a sock on another side; and the impoverished landowner, Telegin, the most completely failed character in the play, starts stirringly to strum his guitar. Vanya is central here - Vanya Agonistes - but everything around him says that life will continue, that work will carry us, that hope may dawn again. |
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The Guardian Thursday April 2, 1998 Holding a mirror up to desolation Uncle Vanya - Young Vic review by Michael Billington I HAVE measured out my life in Uncle Vanyas: indeed two particular productions, by Laurence Olivier and Peter Stein, will haunt me to my grave. But even if Katie Mitchell's RSC/Young Vic co-production is not quite on the same exalted plane, it is still a treasurable occasion likely to penetrate the memory for days afterwards. David Lan, in the published Introduction to his new version, makes a subtle point that whereas The Seagull belongs to the 19th-century theatre, in Uncle Vanya Chekhov was writing the first modern play. That strikes me as profoundly true, in that atmosphere prevails over incident. By the end all that has really happened is that Vanya and his niece, Sonya, have come face to face with the waste and desolation of their infinitely sad lives. In Uncle Vanya, Chekhov discards melodrama; yet how beautifully he orchestrates the quotidian realities of life. And the great thing about Mitchell's production is that it combines minute attention to detail with rigorous sense of form. As an example, one has only to look at its brilliant use of light, space and sound. In the first act we are constantly reminded we are in a summer country garden by the buzzing flies and waist-high broom: by the last act, in Vanya's disordered bedroom-office, there is a sense of autumnal darkness and oil-lit gloom symbolising the shrunken hopes of the house's occupants. Mitchell also has the confidence never to raise her voice: she allows us to eavesdrop, as it were on intimate conversations to often devastating effect. Only in the famous moment where Vanya tries to shoot the Professor does the production miss Chekhov's tragi-comic momentum. This is a rich, detailed production blessed by some excellent performances. Stephen Dillane's Vanya is an angry obsessive who sees everywhere a mockery of his own wasted potential: when his mother refers to him as a "guiding light" he reacts with undisguised venom. Anastasia Hille's Yelena likewise seems torn apart by her awareness of her own futility. Like all the best Sonyas, Jo McInnes also makes you feel that Astrov, in rejecting her, is ruining his own chance of happiness and Linus Roache makes Astrov himself a quietly sensitive man alert to the destructiveness of idleness. But perhaps the real quality of the production lies in the fact that you emerge feeling you have seen less a piece of drama than a mirror held up, with heartrending accuracy, to nature itself. |
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Icon Wednesday July 18, 2001 Mobiles cause stage rage (an excerpt) by Anthony Barnes Mobile phones may be the latest threat to the peace of theatregoers, but low tech grumbles about sweet wrapper rustling are the biggest irritation, a poll has found. Nine out of 10 stage buffs said they were regularly disturbed by other members of the audience, and most thought the situation was getting worse. Snoring and even fights were among the annoyances uncovered in the poll carried out by the Whatsonstage.com Web site. More than 500 theatregoers were polled, and 79 per cent said people unwrapping sweets regularly disturbed enjoyment of performances. One exasperated respondent said: "Theatres should not sell such noisy stuff." Close behind were talking and whispering (69 per cent), and arriving late to the show or returning late from the interval (64 per cent). Mobile phones were a regular nuisance to 59 per cent of theatregoers - many venues now warn the audience to switch off their machines. Other assorted electronic beeps - such as watches - were an irritant for 47 per cent of those questioned. Further grumbles included tall people in the seats in front of them (38 per cent), and armrest hogging (20 per cent). Snoring disturbed one in eight theatregoers. One respondent said: "I remember being at a studio production when someone did indeed start audibly snoring. With a capacity of around 80, the actors couldn't help but overhear and had to raise their voices in a bid to wake the offender up." One respondent told of witnessing a physical fight at a performance of Uncle Vanya at the Young Vic theatre which caused the actors to stop in their tracks. "I think the guy had a sleep apnoea problem or something, and kept dropping off and snoring really loudly, much to the annoyance of the woman a couple of seats along, who hit him in an attempt to stop him," he said. "So then he started shouting, and, I'm not joking, Linus Roache and Stephen Dillane stopped what they were doing on stage and looked over at us all. "My friend and I were cowering in our seats, wishing we'd picked another night." |
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| This page was last updated on September 27, 2002. |
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