This handsome playhouse, its form inspired by its Elizabethan namesake, made a striking impression at its Friday night unveiling. Triple-tiered and horseshoe shaped, with cheap-price space at the front for people sitting on cushions, the Rose clasps the 900-strong audience in a fairly close, contemporary embrace.
Since the theatre lacks subsidy from the hopeless Arts Council, however, its first season consists of imported productions and sadly it may not achieve a distinctive identity as a commercial enterprise. I also wonder whether the great width and relative narrowness of the Rose stage renders it suitable for an intimate piece such as Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, which bursts briefly into dynamic, physical life.
Sir Peter Hall's production for English Touring Theatre casts an intense glow of melancholia upon Chekhov's modestly landed, late 19th-century gentry and on a play that rises to a climax veering between black comedy and high pathos. Here they languish, these futile, pre-revolutionary characters, in a provincial Russia contaminated by poverty, disease and deforested wasteland. Sir Peter conveys the underlying bleakness with perfectly pitched pessimism.
Antonia Pemberton's unruffled Nurse and Faith Brook as Vanya's bookish, self-absorbed mother are solitary examples of relative content. Alison Chitty's austere, handsome set, with its scattering of stylish furniture, lacks rural atmospherics and leaves you to imagine how Chekhov's people are insulated from the precarious, wider world.
The return of aged Professor Serebryakov - a gruffly pompous Ronald Pickup, and his voluptuous, young wife, Yelena, to whom Michelle Dockery lends rather too much languid passivity, sets the play alive with urgent, erotic hankering. Nicholas Le Prevost's interesting, unusual Uncle Vanya bristles with a nervous energy that vividly betrays both the man's desperation and his newly awakened longing for indifferent Yelena, at whom he lunges in a move teetering on harassments verge. By contrast, that early, passionate Green Man, Dr Astrov, whom a bearded, booted Neil Pearson plays without much dynamism, sparks flickers of interest in this femme fatale.
Unfortunately Sir Peter does not bring the third act climactics, with its botched shooting, to emotional high-peaks. Le Prevost catches the comedy but not Vanya's terrible anguish. A shrill, not always audible Loo Brealey misses the lovelorn Sonya's despairing stoicism. This Uncle Vanya, in Stephen Mulryne's serviceable 1999 translation, conveys the right Chekhovian darkness of spirit but not the accompanying emotional turbulence.
Information: 0870 890 6004, closes 9 February.
Uncle Vanya
Rose Theatre
High Street, KT1 1HL
