Uncle Vanya with Toby Jones

This pushed me over the edge so I’ve booked. Managed respectable price for the date I chose.

Plus Toby Jones, Richard Armitage, Ciaran Hands and Anna Calder Marshall all delivering exactly the same performances they always do

I paid the same for seats in the stalls not restricted at all.

I was going to book for my mid February London visit. Now I'm wondering if I should wait and do day seats.

Depends where the day tickets are located, for the effort of turning up at the box office at 10:00 they’d need to be stalls for me, with the TodayTix option you can see where they are and decide whether to go ahead.

the Rushticket I was offered today was C20

Saw it last night and loved it. It's topical, despite not being set in the now, on account of it's marvelous central double act: a hilariously acerbic Vanya in Toby Jones, an everyman Victor Meldrew moaning about ever receding horizons, and a desperately romantic environmental visionary of an Astrov in Richard Armitage, a grown-up melancholy Greta Thunberg who has finally realised noone will ever listen to him in his own time, but who dreams of us, in 100 years, benefitting from the trees he planted.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Conor McPherson means this version/translation to be funny. He uses words like "whang" and "banana," that when spoken by the right actor with just the right amount of acid spin will make an audience laugh. In Toby Jones, the production has one of the few actors who are equally nimble with comedy and drama. Like Mark Rylance or Andrew Scott, he is able to read a line with Rowan Atkinson's comedic timing and verbal precision, yet then effortlessly elide into horrendously sad and real emotional places.

And McPherson does mean us to relate personally to the main characters, rather than analyse their plight from afar, which is why he incorporates a monologue each for the principals. In Vanya's monologue, he means us to connect to our own present economic uncertainties, and in Astrov's to our own decaying environment.

Thinking about Australia's struggling environment and wildlife, I never felt such a deep connection to Astrov's romanticism about trees!

Very frequently, Astrov is portrayed as the ultimate alpha male (I recall William Houston bleeding testosterone from his ears at the Print Room, or Tobias Menzies puffing his chest at the Almeida) in order to foreground Vanya's beta-male tragedy. Not here.

Here, Armitage is subdued, too lovably lost in his romantic vision to puff his chest. At one critical moment, he punctures his own virility with a raspberry. And Toby Jones' Vanya is actually as alpha-male assertive as I have ever seen a Vanya, an ever joking Meldrew or Blackadder, effortlessly piercing the inananites of everyone around him to the evident amusement of the audience, including myself.

This rebalancing of the alpha-beta roles of Vanya and Astrov does serve to weaken the dramatic impact of Vanya's personal tragedy, as does the rebalancing of the ostensible villain of the piece, Professor Serebryakov, played by Ciaran Hinds.

Most often, Serebryakov is presented as more verbose, more pedantic and more overbearing than the worst Poloniuses. But not here. Hinds is the most reasonable "villain" imaginable, and he even gets us to laugh WITH him at one point, when he justifiably closes down the irritating rabbiting on of Vanya's mother. I loved Hinds in this, as he did something noone has done for me before: he made me feel the family patriarch's point of view, especially his perfectly reasonable assertion that people should simply SAY what they want, and not sit suffering in silence for years, and then moan about it.

For the above reasons, this version does not play out like some great tragedy of one weak man one hundred years ago. Instead, it feels like the tale of all of US now, struggling with fast paced change, waning economics and a decaying environment. We are all the characters, we want what they want, we fall like they fall.

This version is not as dramatically acute as a typical Uncle Vanya, but it's more US, and it's more NOW, and it's got a lot of laughs to cheer us all up too, thanks to Toby Jones, and a fantastic ensemble all around him.

4 and a half stars.

Thanks Steve. I Will be checking up on your comments after Saturday night - we are usually on the same page.

Most excellent.

In the first two acts all the humour is extracted with Toby able to wring out every laugh from the text. Initially it felt like watching a different play as the often bitter and broken portrayal of Vanya is blown away which on reflection brilliantly emphasises the influence of the bewitching Yelena with the Vanya we know emerging following the proposal from Serebryakov.

The humour makes the ending even more heartbreaking as Sonya and Vanya slip back into their nihilistic and dour existences.

Can see this being one of the must sees of the year and tickets potentially becoming hard to get, the TodayTix Rush tickets are excellent value as the stage is not too high and the view is only impaired occasionally by a table which would be the same for the first 3 or 4 rows, this is more than compensated by a majority of the intimate scenes taking place front and centre just a few feet away.

With Steve 4½ Stars from me.

Was also at the matinee yesterday. Agree it's excellent. Regarding the back of the set Lynette mentioned - I found the modern emergency exit sign distracting in such an otherwise highly detailed set - surprised they didn't extend the side wall across this.

Couple of (I think?) unplanned incidents - when Ciaran Hinds rang his bell, the clapper flew off towards the side of the stage. Didn't look like this was supposed to happen from his reaction. Shortly after this, Richard Armitage seemed to wander on stage at the wrong time - he came on from stage left, sat at the back for a bit then got back off stage at some point (didn't notice when). Then he entered properly a few minutes later.

Lots of signs saying "no food in the auditorium" and ushers being very pro-active making sure people had their phones off before curtain up.