There are many things that are admirable about the Soulpepper Theatre Company's current production of Uncle Vanya playing at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre -- designer Michael Levine creates a timeless but emphatically Russian setting; director Laszlo Marton balances the elements of farce and tragedy in the play -- but what's crucial to its success is the richness of its characters. In the title role, Diego Matamoros reveals the pathos of Vanya's clowning and his compromises; as his awkward and ugly niece, the put-upon workhorse Sonya, Liisa Repo-Martell dares to create a figure who is utterly worthy yet almost repellent, while Kristen Thomson's Elena achieves the unusual combination of a woman who is both highly anxious and very sexy.
It's rare that a critic gets to witness the process that might produce such results -- directors don't often invite the press to rehearsals -- so when Soulpepper suggested I might like to eavesdrop on Marton as he conducted a master class for young actors, I welcomed the opportunity. His actors were not Soulpepper's seasoned crew but rather recent graduates of theatre programs at the University of Toronto and George Brown College. They would be doing scene work -- training sessions in which actors concentrate on a few scenes from the classics, rather than a whole play -- and the source would be Platonov.
It's an early and sprawling drama by Anton Chekhov about a disaffected young teacher who is casually cheating on his sweet young wife and drinking to excess: The playwright wrote it while still a medical student before he produced better-known dramas such as Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. Marton, the Hungarian director whom Soulpepper has invited across the Atlantic on several occasions, staged a heavily abridged and highly successful version of Platonov with the company two years ago. He said he chose to revisit it both because the characters in their late 20s and 30s would be close to his students in age and because he's still interested in the script.
When I arrived at the ramshackle rehearsal space where they were working, the master-class students were deep into two scenes from the play, with different groups acting them out according to their own staging followed by comments from Marton.
In one scene the feckless Platonov is chastised by Sophia, his lover of three weeks standing, after he has fallen asleep drunk and missed their secret rendezvous.
In another, in the small hours of a night of partying, Platonov mercilessly teases the awkward Grekova, who turns on her date for the evening, upbraiding him for his failure to defend her.
These people may be near to the young actors in age, but understanding the risk Sophia is taking with this affair, the depth of Grekova's humiliation or the nature of Platonov's depression takes work. It turns out that Marton uses what you might called modified method acting -- he's not suggesting anyone drink themselves silly to perform these scenes, but asks his students to empathize with the characters, to be subtle enough to discover the nub of Platonov's problem in the words he pleadingly speaks to Sophia: "Bring me back to life!" or to be brave enough to deliver Grekova's insecurity and ugliness.
The results are fascinating to watch as he makes a pair of actors playing Grekova and her unfortunate date exit and start again, and exit and start again, and again and again, beginning their battling before they have even entered the stage so they come on with the manic energy of a rowdy party going sour. As they go at it, their lines gradually sound less and less stagey and suddenly, in the midst of the cluttered backstage lounge they have chosen as their setting, a true fight seems wholly present and Grekova's tears are real. They are now close enough to the characters that their acting has become invisible.
Chekhov's plays once had the reputation of lugubrious dramas as determinedly depressive as their characters, but these actors benefit from living in the midst of a wonderful revival of interest in the notion that the plays the Russian writer often labelled comedies were exactly that. Marton's contribution to this revival, which in the English-speaking world was driven by the casual, contemporary drama of the 1994 Louis Malle film Vanya on 42nd Street, is an insistence on the rough Russian setting.
"When they started to play these plays in white clothes, they couldn't get close to what was happening," Marton said, referring to the lawn dresses and linen suits in which the genteel English-language productions have tended to be staged. Marton stresses that actors and audiences should find in the characters people as familiar as one's Uncle Mike or old friend Susan. But getting close to the characters means not merely recognizing familiar figures as one might in any trendy contemporary drama -- oh, he should try Prozac -- but actually seeing the complicated mechanisms of their joys and their sorrows at work.
When that happens, as it does in Marton's productions, Chekhov can emerge as the most vivid of the great 19th-century playwrights, revealing living human dilemmas with none of Bernard Shaw's twisting intellectualizing nor Henrik Ibsen's baroque symbols.
It was 11 years ago that Marton first visited Canada to conduct a workshop of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Several of the eager young actors in that production are now the members of the Soulpepper troupe who have invited him back to direct them and teach the next generation, as the learning curve comes full circle.