Vanya review: Andrew Scott’s take on Chekhov is funny, sexy and surprisingly emotional

I had doubts about whether even a towering acting talent like Andrew Scott could make a one-man version of Uncle Vanya feel like more than a gimmick. But Fleabag’s hot priest has delivered a performance that Chekhov fans will want to fall to their knees and adore: the funniest, sexiest, most surprisingly emotional take on this story of rural desolation that you could wish for.

Simon Stephens’s lean one-hour-40-minute version shifts the action from turn-of-the-century Russia to 20th-century Ireland. We’re marooned on a desolate farm where folk songs trickle from the battery-powered radio, and housekeeper Maureen (rechristened from the original’s Marina) calls Ivan (aka the titular Vanya) a “silly little sausage”. And Ivan really has been put through life’s mincer, chewed up and spat out. He’s devoted himself to the service of superannuated wunderkind Alexander, managing his country estate while this supposed genius lives a smart life in town with his infuriatingly beautiful young wife Helena.

In a psychologically astute touch from Stephens, Alexander becomes an auteur film director, and Ivan’s labours are the ultimate tribute of a superfan who watches his idol’s movies every night. “His only successful films are adaptations,” Ivan says bitterly, in a self-referential nod to this play’s origins, as the scales fall from his eyes.

Scott shifts between eight different characters here with an endless wit and energy, his light and flexible voice giving just as much weight and dignity to the female roles as the male ones: Helena is all brittle, flirtatious archness, while her put-upon love rival Sonia is agonising to watch, hiding her unrequited love in an old dishcloth, thrown over her reddening face.

Chekhov’s plays often have a static quality – people sit about, sipping tea, lamenting their lives, resenting each other – one that’s emphasised by recent productions such as Jamie Lloyd’s brilliantly uncompromising The Seagull, where the whole cast sit on wooden chairs on an empty stage, trapped in a purgatorial, liminal space. So it’s refreshing to see how much animation and liveliness Scott’s multi-roling brings to the story here.

Director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize turn the stage into a box of tricks for him to deploy. There are joyful flourishes such as a giant swing he coyly sits on as Helena, a vast mirror that magnifies Ivan’s erupting misery, and a miniature sound effect player that signals characters’ entrances and exits with comical whistles or crashes. Scott becomes an overgrown child, his play weighed down by adult miseries.

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It could so easily feel tricksy, but Scott’s performance has a raw intensity that ignites this ingenious staging. The love triangle between Helena, Sonia and Doctor Michael burns as bright as a firelighter – and if Scott’s rendition of Helena and Michael’s illicit coupling isn’t the West End’s first ever one-man sex scene, it must be its sexiest, his body starfished against a door, his limbs seeming to multiply as he evokes two people’s guilty ecstasy.

The quieter, more desolate moments of Vanya don’t always have the crushing emotional impact you’d get in more traditional Chekhov productions – that sense of utter loneliness in a forest of equally discontented fellow travellers. But it’s hard to complain when Scott brings so much freshness and vim to this well-loved play, turning what could be self-indulgence into a nimble, sensual revelation.