Review: Fleabag Hot Priest Andrew Scott Stars in a Solo Vanya That Has Faith in Its Audience

It’s hard to imagine many West End productions starting as accidentally as the new Sam Yates West End staging of Uncle Vanya.

Originally conceived as a fully cast production with Andrew Scott in the title role, throughout the early workshop process, the creative team decided to simply stage the show with Scott in every role, an artistic experiment that no doubt was music to the ears of anyone doing the budgeting for a conventionally ensemble-led piece.

Rechristened simply Vanya (instantly isolating the figure, no longer grounded by his familial ties), Scott, Yates, designer Rosanna Vize, and writer Simon Stephens have pulled off something terribly effective, harrowing, mesmerizing, and cutting to the heart of what Chekhov was driving at in his tale of provincial woe.

For those who don’t have a comprehensive understanding of Chekhov’s play, it may be tricky to follow Stephens’s new take (transplanted to the other side of Europe and set on a potato farm), presented on Vize’s liminal rehearsal room set. It follows a slightly dysfunctional group of individuals in the same country pad, including a disillusioned Vanya, his niece, the resident doctor, Vanya’s distracted mother, and local help. Their unchanging countryside tranquility is upended by the arrival of Vanya’s brother-in-law and his young wife, whose financial concerns jeopardize the future of Vanya’s family home.

If you’re looking for quick-fire plot points, not all that much happens here, but it helps that the show has one of the most charismatic performers working right now in the driver’s seat. Scott could read from a phone directory and make it sound like a Pulitzer-winning text. His unassuming and endearing performance emanates generosity, revelling in holding the audience’s hand and guiding them through the (often heartily funny) world Vanya trapes through.

Really though, it is the way that Yates directs Scott that feels most innovative. As fans of solo performance will tell you, playing multiple roles usually relies on repeated gestures and different tones of voice to demarcate individual characters – the lighting of a cigarette for a jaded maid, the clutching of a necklace for an unfulfilled younger spouse. All of this is there at the start of the piece, but as we settle into the rhythm, the strict parameters are stripped away and the stabilizers are unscrewed. Narrative clarity deliberately feels less opaque as Yates reaches for an underlying miasma of emotional pain that sits beneath the simmering sadness of this unorthodox family. It’s a huge leap-of-faith to trust your audience to let themselves go with the ebb and flow of turmoil.

What Scott becomes, at the close, is a fractured mirror of unrequited love, unsated and left to wilt in the dying twilight.