Vania

Chekhov did not wish to stage The Wood Demon, this “great Roman comedy” with a barely translatable title, written during the success of Ivanov and his one act plays. It’s crushing failure when premiered in 1889 proved him right. Consequently, between 1890 and 1896, he reworked the play, which eventually became Uncle Vanya. The familiar Chekhovian themes remained – the idleness and boredom of country life, the aspiration to an ideal, failure – but the plot was tightened and the comedy turned into drama. Not only did Chekhov categorically refuse to let The Wood Demon be staged or published, he was also reluctant to have Uncle Vanya produced in big theatres, before accepting to give it to the Moscow Art Theatre, where The Seagull was a huge success. On 26 October 1899, it triumphed on its opening night, which Chekhov did not attend, with Stanislavski in the role of Astrov. Gorky counted among his fervent admirers.

From the Moscow Art Theatre to the Comédie-Française, generations of stage and screen actors have been seduced by the depth of the characters.

Revealed in France in 1921 by Georges Pitoëff, who directed and acted in Uncle Vanya at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, the play entered the Comédie-Française repertoire in 1961, coming after earlier productions of two of Chekhov’s short plays, Swansong (1945) andThe Bear (1957). In this 1961 staging by the young avant-garde director Jacques Mauclair, the translator Elsa Triolet appreciated the cutting of the tearful side that had annoyed Chekhov in Stanislavski’s staging. In 1985, the Comédie-Française presented a new production directed by Félix Prader, at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis and then on tour. Vania d’après Oncle Vania, proposed in 2016 by Julie Deliquet, provided an opportunity for this director to continue her work on the actors’ performance.