ABSTRACT
That a play can be more than finely acted while worse than foolishly produced was abundantly demonstrated in the Old Vic's rendering of ‘Uncle Vanya’ at the New Theatre. Mr. Ralph Richardson's performance as Vanya gives a superb lead to an excellent cast. It excels in its universality. This is not just the Russian occupant of a house of regrets, busy being self-consciously Chekhovian; it is Everyman who ever frittered away his powers and chances and found himself, near 50, unloved, unoccupied, and unfulfilled. And yet so easily might Vanya be rescued, for with all his fuddled clumsiness and gauche petulance he is a man of some capacity and greater charm. Mr. Richardson is a masterly conveyor of what the Elizabethans called silliness and we call simplicity or innocence. There is never any doubt that his acting; his entry always proclaims the original virtue of mankind (hence his rogues, when he plays them, are irresistible), and the lubberly, earth-bound Vanya, dreaming of the heavens he has never stormed, offers the kind of pathos that he plays to perfection and would disdain to overplay.
