Along with Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya is credited as one of Chekhov's masterpieces and a significant precursor of modern drama. Set on a country estate in late nineteenth century Russia, Uncle Vanya is in part a study of the enervation of Russian middle-class provincial life. The major dynamics between the characters themselves are centred on two obsessive love affairs that lead nowhere and a flirtation that brings disaster. Mixing the tragic and the absurd and dealing with a form that allows for ambiguity and contradiction, Uncle Vanya has been deemed "the first modernist play". (David Lan)

A translation of the play by the Russian writer who also wrote The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull and The Three Sisters. The translator wrote her version in collaboration with the cast of the 1992 National Theatre production of Uncle Vanya, which includes Ian McKellen and Antony Sher.

Set on an estate in 19th-century Russia, this structurally and psychologically compact drama explores the complex interrelationships between a retired professor, his second wife, and the daughter and brother-in-law from his first marriage.

A comic drama about summer love. When a retired professor and his beautiful young second wife arrive at their remote family estate to settle down, they disrupt the quiet farm life with their city ways. Against a late-summer country landscape, the inhabitants of the house quickly discover new passions and revisit old loves. In this new translation, Chekhov’s comedy conjures the lifelong contemplation of what is and what might have been.

THE STORY: The scene is a country estate in the declining days of Czarist Russia, the home of an old and ailing professor, his young wife, and various other family members. For years the estate, under the management of Uncle Vanya, brother of the p

THE STORY: Two lives, Uncle Vanya and his niece Sonya, are at the core of this play. They work their small estate, live frugally and keep their emotions tightly reined in. Then they are visited by a relative, Professor Serebryakov, and his beautifu