Andrew Scott in Vanya. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Among numerous high-profile productions of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in the past two seasons (including Lincoln Center Theatre’s and a co-production between Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company), the Vanya now playing off-Broadway is unique. Having opened on London’s West End in 2023 and transferred here this month, it features one actor, Andrew Scott, playing all the roles in Chekhov’s 1897 classic.

It’s a phenomenal performance and a tremendous artistic accomplishment. But is this a stunt or a serious investigation of the original? And does it enhance our appreciation and understanding of Chekhov?

In 110 uninterrupted mesmerizing minutes, Scott, the remarkable forty-eight-year-old, Irish-born actor, plays eight roles: men and women ranging in age from early twenties to late seventies. Adapted by Simon Stephens, this Vanya features a provocative subtitle: After Anton Chekhov. I’m never quite sure what “after” means, except to give the adaptors freedom to do what they wish. Apparently, in this instance, it indicates that the co-creators—Scott, Stephens, director Sam Yates, and designer Rosanna Vize—want to showcase the astonishing feat of a one-man show, but not at the expense of the original.

This Vanya adheres to Chekhov’s setting of a family living in the countryside over the course of one summer (though the actual location and time aren’t clearly specified). In Chekhov’s original, it’s an estate in Russia in 1897. Here, it’s apparently a potato farm in contemporary rural Ireland, managed by Vanya, whose late sister owned it and has passed it on to her daughter, Sonya, Vanya’s niece. The set features a modern, nondescript living area (including kitchen, room dividers, and a door).

The precipitating event of the play is the arrival of Sonya’s father with his young second wife. To meet his own financial needs, he wants to sell the estate, threatening the stability of Vanya’s and Sonya’s lives (as well as those of Vanya’s mother and Sonya’s aged nanny, who also live there). Other characters in the play include a country doctor who is the object of Sonya’s unrequited love; he becomes attracted to Sonya’s beautiful stepmother, creating an unsustainable love triangle.

Chekhov’s original characters are updated and mostly given Irish names. Vanya is called Ivan, the formal name Chekhov gave him. The doctor Mikhail Astrov is now Michael; the beautiful Yelena is now Helena; the nanny Marina is now Maureen. Sonya’s father, originally the professor Alexander Serebryakov, is now a filmmaker; and so on. But the relationships between the characters remain basically as Chekhov wrote them.

Miraculously, they all inhabit this one actor, who brings them to life in scene after scene with no costume changes. He changes vocal register and uses certain props to identify the character whose lines he is speaking, at least in the early parts of the piece. When he’s Ivan, for example, he wears dark glasses; when he’s the doctor, he bounces a tennis ball and modulates to a lower, deeper voice; when he’s Sonya, he holds a red dishcloth. He uses the set’s two room dividers with a door in between to make quick exits and entrances when a new character appears. In scenes with two or more characters in dialogue, the changes occur at a split-second speed.

Scott has developed an intricate acting technique to meet the challenge. There are moments you’ve never seen before onstage. In the erotic scenes between Michael and Helena, for example, Scott demonstrates their growing intimacy with the caress of his hand (belonging to the doctor) on his own face (belonging to Helena). In the final scene, instead of a kiss (in the original), fuller lovemaking is suggested, with Scott’s body pressed against the door as he plays both characters engaged in the act. It’s a strange and arresting moment, visually.

For those who know Chekhov’s original, the most notable absence is any reference to the play’s context, namely, the Russian countryside in a time of a gradual, historic change. There’s also a difference in comedic tone. Chekhov’s plays are famous for their so-called “laughter-through-tears,” a fundamental feature of the so-called Russian soul. As “translated” into Irish, it’s a brighter, lighter tone of humor. Still, it works. This is the funniest version of Uncle Vanya I’ve ever seen. Much of it is generated by Scott’s split-second timing in morphing from one character to the next, scene after scene. (He sometimes reminds me of a ventriloquist.)

There are some jarring moments due to lines that the adaptors have added. One example is Vanya’s aside to the audience during his soliloquy in Act II: “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get the girls.” On the other hand, the delivery of soliloquies as direct audience addresses (Vanya’s, Sonya’s, and Helena’s) is a captivating choice that engages the audience’s rapt attention. Other new insertions come from yet another culture, like Vanya’s song in Act IV (“If you go away,” Jacques Brel’s famous “Ne me quittez pas”). Nonetheless, it captures the moodiness that permeates Chekhov’s original.

And credit is due to Scott and his co-creators for delivering the essence of Chekhov’s original: tragicomedy, a unique new form that Chekhov is credited for having introduced. Uncle Vanya is itself an adaptation of an earlier Chekhov play, a light comedy called The Wood Demon (1889), which received universally bad reviews. Eight years later, after he moved to the countryside, his worldview changed as he experienced increasing illness, isolation, and the inevitable passage of time. To express that change, he rewrote the earlier comedy as the tragicomedy Uncle Vanya.

Whether it’s called an “adaptation,” a “version,” or “after” the original, reinterpreting a classic is a risky business. As a Chekhov biographer and translator, I look at adaptations from the standpoint of whether they enrich our understanding of Chekhov’s work. If we ask whether Andrew Scott’s Vanya is faithful when it comes to Chekhov’s fundamental tragicomic essence, I would say the answer is yes, in its own way and in its new context.

As for the theme of isolation, it’s a major element in Chekhov’s original, one he felt keenly after he moved to the countryside in 1891 and settled on his “estate” (a modest dacha). His declining health and his distance from the Moscow theatre and literary scene generated emotions he felt keenly. That sense of isolation in the countryside, of boredom and malaise, so central to Chekhov’s original, is clearly felt here. As for the loneliness, what could be more explicit than the presence of only one actor onstage?

In addition, there’s Chekhov’s theme of the inexorable passage of time, as expressed in Act III, when the doctor—a nineteenth-century environmentalist devoted to preserving the Russian forests—attempts to show Helena a slide show of the alarming changes in their country district over the past decades, Jack Phelan’s video designs, projecting the Irish countryside where Scott’s Vanya is trapped, capture that metamorphosis vividly.

What surprises me is that, when I look back on the production, I think of Scott as Vanya, rather than any of the other characters he plays. It’s almost like looking at a portrait by Picasso painted during his Cubist period, with a fragmented face. In this case, it’s the face of Vanya, shown from different angles simultaneously: the light, the shaded, and the dark.