Fires, floods, strained social orders, intergenerational struggle over property, lost standing, decay and unease . . . it wasn’t at all hard to find contemporary parallels in Uncle Vanya, opening at Circa last night (and running until 10 October, and worth your time), and Andrew Foster’s adaptation did nice working making the ‘scenes from country life’ ring from Chekhov’s day to ours. More important for me, thinking on the performance the morning after the night before, was the energy of it all. Carmel McGlone, surely one of Aotearoa’s best character actors, doesn’t have enough to do as Maria - blame Chekhov for that, but, and what she does do she does! As do Tawhi Thomas as Vanya, Kali Kopae as Helena, all six of the actors across the night.

All that great Russian gloom is translated somehow properly into a New Zealand gloom (Patrick White: “I shouldn’t be surprised if any New Zealander took a gun to his neighbour. Guns are to New Zealanders as axes are to Poles”)! It was oddly cheering, for reasons I don’t understand, to feel it all settle in and see it acted out so well. Disappointment; death; despair; discord. All the usual. I’m glad I went.