Review: Andrew Scott Creates a World Out of Nothing in Vanya

There are optical illusions that, if you stare at them long enough, force your eyes to see certain images projected wherever you look. Stare at Andrew Scott’s astonishing one-man performance in Vanya for long enough and you may imagine you see a full cast onstage, occupying a decked-out dacha where there’s only a table, a few chairs, and a doorframe.

In director Sam Yates’s wrenching and witty staging of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, which first played on the West End in London in 2023, Scott (Sherlock, Fleabag, Ripley) takes on all eight of Chekhov’s characters and makes them seem physically present at once. In Simon Stephens’s lithe adaptation, long-festering desires and grudges bubble up from the malaise of a country estate run by the jaded title character and his lovelorn niece, Sonia. Everyone is lonely, but hope surfaces here and there, half-hidden smiles and unpremeditated giggles ballooning from an ever-metamorphosing performance.

Scott’s transformations are driven primarily by shifts in his vocal register and tone: Those varied voices never slip into caricature, and they remain entirely distinct. It would not be hard to follow this Vanya with your eyes closed.

The rapid switches between characters are never played for laughs, even when the dining room is full of guests and servants. Scott leans most often into stillness, lightly adjusting his posture or adopting a gesture to become the next speaker. Mid-conversation, he sometimes walks leisurely across the stage so we can visualize each character’s position—Helena rocking herself on a swing, Vanya sitting heavy with drink at the table—but he transitions between characters seamlessly no matter where he’s standing. Sonia carries a red handkerchief, Alexander wears a scarf, Astrov bounces a tennis ball, but after a few lines, we barely need these clues to remember who’s who.

This dramatic conjuring is like physical ventriloquism: When we see Scott standing in one spot, he seems to populate the rest of the stage with the other characters he embodies. We always know where everyone is sitting. It’s a bewitching collaboration between actor and audience, storytelling that seems to skate effortlessly on a frozen lake of shared imagination.

The uncanniest moments of Vanya take place in the most intimate encounters between characters. Sonia and Astrov wrestle over a bottle of vodka, and, though we see only one hand on the bottle, we can always tell from the tightness of the grip and the curl of the grimaces who’s in control. With his hands tucked behind his back, Scott shows Sonia guiding her father Alexander out of the room, but we somehow glimpse the old man too, the tilt of Scott’s shoulder tracing Alexander’s invisible body. And in the tensely erotic interchanges between Astrov and Helena, Scott communicates the physics of brief passion with almost no movement at all. Such movements could easily tip toward silliness in less gentle hands, but Scott commands silent focus from the audience at these most delicate points of connection.

The extraordinary gestures (Michela Meazza is credited with “Physicality” in the program) unfold across co-creator Rosanna Vize’s subdued playground of a set that seems to sense those invisible presences as we do: The keys of the upright piano in the corner can even play without being touched.

Stephens, best known in New York for his stage version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, provides a thoughtful adaptation. While the text has been slimmed down to 100 minutes and the language and setting feel vaguely contemporary (Vanya’s brother-in-law Alexander is a filmmaker rather than a professor), Stephens hews closely to Chekhov’s shaping of each scene. If a bit too liberally adapted to be considered a straight translation, this is still about as Uncle Vanya-ish a staging as you’ll see: humor and melancholy are both animating forces that propel the play in equal measure.

And because Scott treats every character with such rigorous respect, Vanya becomes not so much a deconstruction of a classic as a celebration—of Chekhov, of theater, and of the possibility of actor and audience agreeing to picture a fully-realized world together.