Even at the end of a long day of rehearsals, Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey,” Notting Hill, the Paddington films, and more) conveys free-wheeling humor and astute awareness of theater and film history in an interview. His fluid, crisp articulation come across as genuine; his love for live theater, innate.
Bonneville is preparing for his titular role in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s upcoming presentation of Anton Chekhov’s classic Uncle Vanya. Adapted by Conor McPherson and directed by Simon Godwin, the co-production with Shakespeare Theatre Company runs February 14 through March 23 at Peet’s Theatre in downtown Berkeley.
Uncle Vanya‘s timeless domestic drama premiered in 1899 and swirls around a dysfunctional family. Its characters keep making the same mistakes, trapped in their refusal to bear responsibility for their own flailing. Surprisingly, comedy lurks within its grim psychological outlines. The play’s mix of drama and humor, tackled by the Rep’s cast of seasoned actors who lust for nothing short of a revolutionary take, promises exhilaration.
“The great thing about Chekhov is you have to inhabit it. The way we’re approaching the text is to make it feel contemporary. You are watching characters who may have been created over 100 years ago, but their foibles, manners, and mannerisms are as 21st century as you like,” says Bonneville.
Having spent most of the last eight years working in film and television, he is thrilled to return to the stage: “What I love about theater, which is where I cut my teeth, is the forming of a company to tell a story. On a film or television set, it’s the crew that becomes a company, and the actors drop in and out.”
In rehearsals, actors can “go up blind alleys, reverse out of them, and experiment with new ways of telling what a scene is about,” according to Bonneville. “The approach we’re taking is to tell the audience as they are going in that we’re a group of actors putting on play. Rather than lights down, curtain up, and you’re supposed to believe these real people coming from different places all arrive in the 19th century speaking with the same accent, we very much don’t and we break the fourth wall.”
Bonneville calls McPherson’s rendering of the script “nimble, quick,” and that like other adaptations, it readily reveals that an “authentic version” of any script is an illusion. “Playwrights all add their own texture, spirit, and tone to the relationships and the scripts are therefore not literal translations. His is contemporary without being slang-y. The themes resonate through time because they’re about human behavior.”
There is the risk of playing Chekhov by staring off into the middle distance and saying, “I must go to Moscow,” which Bonneville says would be “stultifying and boring.” Instead, he considers every moment and need of a character. “The moment acting becomes navel-gazing, it ceases to have energy and power. We’re discovering every day how to keep the play active,” he says. “When the connections between characters is electric and alive, the play fizzes. It zips along, ebbs, and flows.”
Bonneville says the characters are hugely funny because they say and do absurd things. Their high-minded proclamations of values and ambitions run counter to their obvious mediocrity and lack of oomph. “Vanya thinking he could be a great writer when he hasn’t done anything about it, and has spent the last 25 years working his butt off to manage the family’s estate? The grandeur and pomposity of the professor character who we now see as a sort of fraud? There are many bubbles to be pricked.
“In the midst of all of this, there’s the love triangle. It’s funny to observe people whose expectations of life have been thwarted. You laugh with them, at them, and you cringe when they come out with sweeping statements about life when they really haven’t a clue.”
In the play’s final scenes, the characters’ pain and pathos kicks in and realization comes that all of them are lost in a maze of their own making. “That is the key to Chekhov: there are no villains. The characters are flawed, three-dimensional, and therefore funny and tragic,” he says.
The family’s tension, post-pandemic, is a pertinent touchstone. “Families were forced to be together longer than expected during the pandemic. Back in the 19th century on an estate like this, you would be condemned to be together for eternity, trapped for decades. There’s an existential, Sartre-style sense of ennui that these characters display. They’re stuck in each other’s company and having to make the best of it with dwindling resources.”
Of working with director Godwin, Bonneville says he values how fresh ideas and approaches are greeted with delight. “He certainly doesn’t expect anything to run on railway tracks. He’s brilliant at encouraging the cast to take risks, do things that go against the grain.”
In his own character, a man who is smart, quick-witted, anarchic, and harbors a wounded heart, he finds an intriguing person whose inertia is largely self-inflicted. “Vanya is a bachelor stuck in a rut, thinking life has passed him by.”
Bonneville is also the author of a best-selling memoir Playing Under the Piano. In it, he reflects on three decades in theater and his path from debuting as the Third Shepard in a school nativity play to becoming a celebrated actor on stage and screen. Expectedly, the book is rife with humorous anecdotes—he often positions himself as the agent of a joke or stumble—but also offers insightful descriptions of people and situations he has encountered, along with more serious political stances related to gun violence and other topics.
Bonneville reveals his next book will be for children, to be released at the end of the year. “I’ve no idea if it’s any good, but I’m loving doing it,” he says.
After decades working as an actor, what he loves most about live theater is the telling of a story is a journey that evolves and changes from night to night.
“As much as I love film and television, you might not even end up in the damn thing,” he says. “The director tells the audience where to look and what to feel at any given moment. In theater, it’s a collective experience and a contract with the audience. In this world of increasing AI and fake this or that, you can’t beat that live sensation.”
UNCLE VANYA runs February 14 through March 23 at Peet’s Theatre, Berk. Tickets and more info here.
