Court’s Vanya fails to connect

Uncle Vanya, The Court Theatre, Directed by Shane Bosher, until June 3

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.

From the opening moment, this fresh adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic play signals that it will not be a traditional production. The opening action is underscored by Harry Nilsson’s classic song about how you can be lonely even when you are in the arms of another.

‘‘One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,’’ Nilsson sings. ’’Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.’’

What follows is living proof of that notion.

Contemporary songs from the likes of Radiohead, Chris Isaak and Fleetwood Mac punctuate this 2012 adaptation of Uncle Vanya by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker.

It is a refreshing take on the classic play, capturing the bleak and funny spirit of what Baker describes as Chekhov’s theme of ’’people feeling really lonely in the same room together’’.

Our characters languish together over a hot summer in a rundown and neglected farmhouse. They are what would now be called a blended family. The patriarch is an ageing and ill professor who moves into his late wife’s estate with his new, younger wife. Their presence upsets the settled order of the farm and brings repressed love and anger to the surface.

It is a play about loneliness, missed connections, alienation, decay, betrayal, repression and lost hopes. But it’s also funny in its own bleak and awkward way.

This new version was first performed in New York in a cramped space where the audience sat on a carpeted floor beneath a small pitched roof they shared with the actors.

While The Court Theatre’s production is delicately and tastefully staged, it never quite musters the rough edges, rawness and intimacy that would have fired this play into true life.

It is technically flawless, with fine performances, a beautiful set and thoughtful, subtle costume choices, but it never quite connects on an emotional level.

There are moments that brilliantly exploit the awkward, funny tension of this play, like when Sonya, played with admirable simplicity by Sophie Hambleton, is driven to distraction by the slightest casual and oblivious touch from her true love, Astrov, brilliantly portrayed as a prickly hipster by Edwin Wright.

But like the play’s characters, this production has intimacy problems.

It is beautifully staged, but too mannered and distant to truly reach out and touch us. – Charlie Gates