Uncle Vanya – getting out …

Though I am in London detox mode and not feeling that great right now, I didn’t really get out of Chekhov yet.

(In a way, London is the only place in the world that works like a drug on me because it is the only place where I feel that I belong, and where I actually feel NORMAL. And, without any comprehensible reason, it has always been like this. The only place in the world where I walk the streets and don’t get instantly pissed off about everything: the traffic, the ugliness, the people, the stupid shops …  And the West End has always been my favourite place in the world anyway, though I have been there only a few times. And I had almost forgotten! Of course this is where I want to be – surrounded by theatres and cinemas. The British Museum always just a few streets away, and the great bookshops! AND I heard a concert at St. Martin in the Fields which I could never make before! I thought the South Bank was my favourite place in London, probably because I see it so often in films and series, but I was wrong. And I dislike Kensington and don’t care much about the City. - I found instant “substitution” though – accidentally! – watching “Ashes to Ashes” - London in the Eighties: definitely the place to be, though it feels like some particularly ugly alien planet - and a more recent film called “Enemies – Welcome to the Punch!” Even though the story is what we already know - men running about with guns, shooting a lot and saying little, whereas women are dying -  it is a toxically beautiful film that is set in the Docklands - which I saw for the first time coming from City Airport. There is a scene that is just incredible - where a huge container yard is filmed from above with somebody wandering about with a flashlight … and similar stuff. And James McAvoy and Mark Strong are simply a pleasure to watch – just these FACES!!! So, about things to look forward to: I have a ticket for the “Cinema” for James McAvoy as Cyrano – which Claudia saw in London and said that it had been “mind-boggling”. So: I’ll hang on, only one week … !!! But how come that I am listening to this right now: “Now the drugs don’t work, they just make you worse …”???  😭😭😭!!! )

But, as I have developed a tenacity about these things that I cannot help finding a bit ridiculous – after all, I don’t do this for a living! – I just noticed that I was not yet through with Chekhov. And that I did “it” again: exactly what I did at the beginning of my reading which instantly became intense and strangely satisfying – but I had to GET OUT! Almost as soon as I started reading, I had to get out again … Now I have done it a few times, and the last time, seeing “Uncle Vanya” in the theatre, it became loads more intense and satisfying, but I DEFINITELY have to get out. It was basically already when I read the first lines of “Uncle Vanya” for the first time when I noticed that THIS was more personal than it usually gets. That it is about ME, and about “us” = all the people I share this feeling with about what is wrong with our lives, these “crossroads” where we have arrived, this LIFE we have got ourselves into without really realizing it, this MOMENT in time, right here, right now - where Greta Thunberg could say that we HAVE to admit that we are FAILING and where so many people suddenly feel the same. This strange perception of simultaneity that I developed reading Chekhov - and which became so acute and urgent watching it in the theatre, where I could SEE that other people had felt the same …

It kind of happened, in “Shakespeare” or elsewhere, but never like this. So, WHAT WAS IT?

I think I am closer now than I was, as I met with Claudia after she came back from London, and when – as a first stage of detox - we met for breakfast. Of course we talked about “Uncle Vanya” again, and it became suddenly intense when we debated what had been going on between Dr Astrov and Sonya. We probably were rather in sync about everything else. But only afterwards I realized that she had asked the right question – the question I had always been looking for:

WHY is there no hope?

I personally don’t really feel – we both didn’t! – that there actually IS no hope. There is always hope, especially WHEN there is nothing else … but, like surprises, this hope is never what we think it would be. I elaborated on my “collarbone feeling” and discovered that something had kind of “sunk in” that had always been right beside me, looking at me, patiently waiting until I would come round to facing it … So much of my reading feels like growing into something more mature and substantial, though – in this case - nothing that makes me feel better. Nonetheless it felt good to be able to look it in the eye. I think it was finally FACING the sentence: IT IS TOO LATE! – which Dr Astrov says but which kind of relates to everybody on that stage except Sonya. She is too young for her life to be killed in the bud – an acute kind of agony which nobody in the audience could have failed to understand. But – what I also find so special about Chekhov – even though NONE of them appears to get anything they want or finds anything decisive to make their lives better – it is always so obvious that life will be GOING ON. And Sonya is the one whom I instantly felt had a great recipe for hope when there IS no hope of anything getting better: WORK. At the end, she expresses this belief that doing good is an end in itself and will be rewarded. Now, I am almost forty years older than she is, and I don’t really BELIEVE in a reward anymore, but I was so surprised when I realized how much I ACT UPON this belief.

Now, this is rather weird, I know that. I just listened to the radio interview Toby Jones and Richard Armitage gave on BBC 2 about “Uncle Vanya”. That is, very little of it actually was about “Uncle Vanya”, but there was this bit where Richard Armitage said that, at bad times in his life, he actually referred to this play and read Sonya’s speech to remind himself. And he said EXACTLY what I thought when I read it: “What would we be without our work? Nothing.”

WHAT!!!??? When I hear somebody speaking my own thoughts I always think that there must be something wrong with my hearing. (Though, in my case, it must mean something infinitely less emphatic. But I wake up every morning, glad that all my petty construction sites are still here, and that I am still here to try and do my best on them. And know that, if anything, THIS will see me through when the bad times will come again.) It is not even that these thoughts are so special. I am sure that there are lots and lots of people who feel exactly the same – I even know a few, and these are the people I genuinely respect – but I never knew anyone who would feel that they could SAY this. I couldn’t have said it – though NOW I can! What I mean, I suppose, is that there are extremely few people in whom what they feel, what they think, what they want to say, and what they actually say is exactly THE SAME. I know that this is what I want to be more than anything, always wanted to be, and what I am actually trying to be, but I never feel that I am coming that close. Probably nobody does, but, as it is with ideals, there is a good reason for their existence. As this is MY ideal of what a human being should be like, I understand it better now why I have such a categorical problem dealing with people who are lying to themselves. They make it impossible FOR ME to be who I really am.

However weird this might be, I just discovered the REASON why I trust Richard Armitage in this way, and always have. (Actually from the first moment I saw him as a dwarf and thought: THIS is it! This is exactly how I am feeling about them.) Why I always believe him when he is playing – MORE than I believe myself and what I have read. (Basically, he uses the same kind of "bullsthit detector" that I use, he is just better at using it.) In “Chekhov” this was the reason why I could be brought to taking “It is too late!” as seriously as it needs to be taken. The sentence actually gets SAID rather late in the play, if I remember this correctly, but it is what he was PLAYING from the beginning. (Though, right at the beginning, he was actually just playing it.) So, this is what my “collarbone feeling” had been about: that I BELIEVED Dr Astrov that it was too late FOR HIM. That the state he is in is already too serious. We both – and I think Richard Armitage as well - diagnosed it as “burnout”. But – even though I cannot really imagine what it is like – I can see that an alarming amount of people are dealing with it, and that it means that serious and lasting damage to someone’s mental state has already been done. There certainly is a cure, but it is not something that other people can give, it is about how people can make themselves feel about themselves. (Sex would be great, I think, like everything that gets us to focus on ourselves in the here and now and makes us feel better, but this whole other human being attached to it would be way too much to deal with - let alone marriage!) And the greatest illusion is probably that people after therapy can go back to what they WERE before all this happened to them … I am rather certain that marriage with Dr Astrov would have been good for SONYA – the more so as she is uncommonly well prepared - for her age! - to put up with any hardship and disappointment. Even under normal circumstances there is no way that he would ever stop drinking and chasing skirt. I don’t think that Chekhov – and Richard Armitage - could have made this more obvious. But there are these windows of opportunity in our lives, and, sometimes without us ever noticing them, they are suddenly closing. And I obviously had no difficulty following Richard Armitage in his analysis that Dr Astrov’s window for a “normal” life and state of happiness had been closed for good. For me, without a measure of doubt, he was taking what Chekhov has written literally:  that there might have been a window of opportunity where he would have considered to marry Sonya, but not anymore. It is tough to think of it in this way - as it SHOULD be. But that I took this self-assessment as a given fact is the reason that, when Claudia described the benefits this marriage would have held for Dr Astrov, I couldn’t ARGUE with it, but my collarbones were screaming: NO!!!

In fact, it couldn’t have been difficult for me to understand because, in my life, the window of opportunity in which I believed that marriage and babies would make me happy has been extremely short, though – trying to be entirely sincere – I have to admit that it WAS there. It has nothing to do with the fact that Dr Astrov is almost forty, but that we have to believe him when he says that he is sick of THIS life! – and, however different the meaning for both of us, I was completely in sync with him. Or AM, as long as I can afford to stay in “Chekhov”. THERE IS NO HOPE - and I have finally to come to terms with what this MEANS.