Cracked Open

on Vanya and art as a companion through unhealing

In the final, famous speech that Sonia gives to Uncle Ivan at the end of Chekhov’s beloved play, Andrew Scott’s one-man show, Vanya, becomes an act of magic. He, playing the delicate Sonia, crouches alongside Vanya, who has recently been suicidal in the wake of Alexander’s announcement about the farm. Vanya is sitting in an ordinary white plastic chair: he is the play's namesake, we might argue, though Sonia is the heart.

“We’ll see that life is radiant and beautiful and dignified and we’ll look back on these unhappy moments and we’ll feel nothing but compassion and we’ll smile, and we’ll take our rest,” Sonia says. She’s trying to convince Vanya, but she is also trying to convince herself. Michael, the doctor, does not love her, and he will not come back. She is plain and will not be able to have what she wants from life; she will instead labor on a potato farm, on and on and on, until she dies.

Of course, her beloved Uncle Vanya is not actually there. No one is there; it’s through Andrew Scott’s vaunted acting that Sonia crouches beside an invisible man made corporeal. Scott bends one arm around one of the arms of the chair, indicating that this is Vanya’s arm that Sonia is stroking. It would seem hokey in the hands of anyone else (to say nothing of the love scenes between Andrew Scott and Andrew Scott), but it’s perfect in Vanya, which I saw on a recent trip to New York. When I saw that desperate scene in which Sonia speaks with certainty of how life will finally, one day, result in some form of understanding, I felt myself crack open and become brittle as if my very self were full of chips of glass.