Andrew Scott is to return to London’s West End to play every character in Uncle Vanya. The star of Sherlock, Fleabag and His Dark Materials will appear for a five-week run at the Duke of York’s theatre from 15 September in a one-man staging of Anton Chekhov’s 1898 classic.
It means Scott will appear not only as Vanya, the morose manager of a rural Russian estate, but also as the landowner Professor Serebryakov, his daughter Sonya and glamorous young wife Yelena. He will also play Vanya’s widowed mother, his romantic rival Astrov, the tenant Telegin and the nurse Maria.
“Heartbreaking, hilarious, sexy, devastating – the singular genius and extraordinary humanity of Mr Chekhov just knocks me out,” said Scott, last seen on stage at London’s Old Vic in Three Kings, livestreamed during lockdown in 2020. “It’s a genuine honour and a singular challenge to bring this giant of a play to life in the West End in this new way and I’m so excited to be doing it alongside such brilliant, playful and talented people.”
The new version is by playwright Simon Stephens, who first worked with Scott on Sea Wall (2008) and again on Birdland (2014). Stephens said he was thrilled at the casting. “I have worked with many great actors,” he said. “But I’ve never worked with one more intelligent, thoughtful, playful, rigorous, searching, sad or ferocious.”
It is the playwright’s third time adapting Chekhov, after The Cherry Orchard (2014) and The Seagull (2017) for directors Katie Mitchell and Sean Holmes respectively. He called this version of Uncle Vanya a “subtle distillation” that was faithful to the original play, despite being performed by a single actor.
“There is no writer I love more deeply,” said Stephens. “No writer has existed in that remarkable space between grief, yearning, sex, murder, vulnerability and fearlessness. Uncle Vanya is one of the great plays about ambition, regret and redundancy.”
The idea to turn Uncle Vanya, now simply called Vanya, into a solo show was an accident of the rehearsal room. Stephens and director Sam Yates had invited Scott to a read-through. Taking it in turns to speak the parts, they became aware of the similarities between the underachieving Vanya and the eco-minded doctor, Astrov. They suggested Scott should try reading both.
“Something rather magical happened,” said Stephens. “As an audience member, you had to interpret. You had to figure out. That process of investigating where a character starts and ends – how a character’s gender, age, class, wealth, background makes sense of themselves – was rendered so alive. I found it haunting. We kept saying, ‘What if you do a little bit more?’”
Scott follows in the footsteps of actors including Alan Cumming, who once played all the characters in Macbeth, and Robert Lepage, who turned Hamlet into the hi-tech one-man show Elsinore. Hamlet is a play Scott knows well, having taken on the lead role at London’s Almeida in 2017 in a production that, like Vanya, was produced by Emily Vaughan-Barratt.
“The great theatrical question is, ‘To be or not to be?’” said Stephens. “Andrew asked that with such astonishing force in Robert Icke’s production. Vanya is Chekhov’s answer to that question and his answer is: you keep going, you try. It is a play written by a doctor who understands the fallibility of human beings because he has been surrounded by them in extremis all his working life. The conclusion of his working medical life is the urgent need to continue to be. That’s what Andrew brings to it.”
Vanya is at Richmond theatre, 28 August–2 September, then at Duke of York’s theatre, London, 15 September–21 October.