#simon stephens

Now that my thoughts are slightly more ordered, I'm writing some of them down digitally as well. I've scribbled 10 handwritten pages though, so there's a lot more from where this comes from! 😅

First of all, how did I see it? As some of you might know, the V&A Museum keeps recordings of plays in their archive. They're accessible for free and for anyone, provided that you watch them at their facility in East London. They're all digitised, they're all on the same server, you don't even have to order the specific play, you just make appointment for the morning or afternoon and they'll usher you into this very sterile, kinda cold room full of screens and headphones where you can basically watch any play in their collection. It's also video surveillanced and there is no real computer outlet for someone to dock on in case one might want to... uhm... liberate the recordings. In my case I was in there alone, probably making very funny faces, noises, and aerobic figures in my seat.

'...The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of two starry new stateside arrivals from London in which a single actor plays every part in a classic story adapted for a modern moment; the other, Vanya, starring Andrew Scott, is quiet and introspective where Dorian Gray is frenetic and exaggerated. And at a time when the omnipresence of social media has brought a kind of self-conscious posturing to the cultural forefront, the two offer markedly different ideas about what it means to imagine oneself as a character, or several, to be watched.

The Wilde adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, twists that critique into one tailored for a very different kind of image-centric era from Wilde’s own, using the device of a single actor to develop a pointed reflection on the ways in which performing a persona for others can rot away every trace of an interior life. Vanya, adapted by Simon Stephens from Anton Chekhov’s turn-of-the-century original, makes for something of a counterpoint, suggesting that there’s extraordinary richness to be found in seeing yourself as the embodiment of multiple intertwining voices, and letting those voices freely engage with one another.

In the difference between them lies a question bedeviling modern culture as it decides whether new norms forged by social media are forces of corruption, opportunity, or both: When is putting on a performance a perversion of the truth, and when is it a kind of manifestation—a way of becoming more freely oneself?...

In contrast to Dorian Gray’s technological wonderland, Vanya is starkly analog. The props that Scott uses onstage are notably low-key: a tape player, a player piano, an electric kettle. And although he initially distinguishes his characters from one another with telling accessories and mannerisms, he eventually comes to differentiate them with little more than a shift in expression and voice. So we come to see them emerging, one after the other, from within him, passing across his face as if Scott’s emotions each take on the characters of fully realized people.

Vanya, which examines the crumbling relationships within a family managing financial woes while stuck in close quarters on a country estate, is a story about the ways people delude and deprive themselves, and how their intimate misunderstandings of themselves can ripple outward, quietly changing the course of other lives too. The plot is propelled by everyday self-deceptions, the kind that could make someone marry a partner they actually dislike—as Helena, the beautiful young wife of the delusional film auteur whose late first wife owned the estate, comes to suspect she might have—or believe that their beloved local doctor’s drinking really isn’t that big of a problem.

But as in Dorian Gray, the interactions of a set of closely linked characters take on a different meaning when all of them have the same face. So when Scott plays a scene in which Helena sees perfectly well what the plain but good-hearted Sonia, the auteur’s daughter by his first wife, cannot—that Sonia’s passion for the alcoholic doctor is never going to be reciprocated—it reads less as a delicate difference of perception between two friends than as a careful compartmentalization of truth within a self. One part adores; the other part knows that that adoration may be unreturned but—at least at first—lets it continue, out of an understanding that if the love were quenched, some essential part of the shared self would die.