Uncle Vanya

Vanya has spent twenty-five years managing a country estate to fund the career of his brother-in-law, a pompous academic whose work he belatedly realises is worthless. When the professor proposes selling the estate out from under him, the confrontation is brief, humiliating and settles nothing. Chekhov’s play is about the arithmetic of a wasted life, and it ends not in catastrophe but in the two of them going back to the accounts.