This is an interesting but challenging production because Scott, who found fame as the attractive priest in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, does not try to make us see a stage crowded with personalities. This is not a bravura display of character acting or quicksilver impressions. Instead, his performance of the eight different roles has a lethargic, almost careless quality. He modifies his voice a little, and gives each character a token object and an obvious mannerism by which they can be identified – Vanya wears sunglasses, the doctor bounces a tennis ball, the nurse smokes a cigarette and so on – but the characterisations are flat and rather flimsy. Indeed, they are somehow deliberately transparent, as if we are meant to look beyond them.

It is almost as though Scott is playing the part of someone who is doing a one-man version of Uncle Vanya. And that person is tired and alone; he has, perhaps, been alone for a very long time. Just as he gives each character a significant gesture that distinguishes them, he also gives them all a unifying gesture that tends to erase the differences between them. Again and again, he rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms. All the main characters do this. It is as if they are all tired in the same way, as if they are all longing for that ultimate rest that Sonya speaks of in the play’s final lines. In the moment of that repeated gesture, it is as if the whole pretence of characterisation is dropped entirely. It is just too exhausting.

Andrew Scott in Vanya (photograph by Marc Brenner).

Scott, of course, is an amiable and accomplished actor, and carries this complicated multiplication of realities with apparent ease. He projects a sense of desolation, but the old charm is still there. And we already know that Scott can do this kind of loneliness. Think, for example, of the first part of All of Us Strangers (2023), where he wanders about the apparently empty apartment building in a daze.

The atmosphere in this production is a lot like those opening scenes. One could imagine this strange production as a game played by the last person on Earth. What better way to while away the empty hours? What better way to confirm your utter isolation?

Simon Stephens’s adaptation is compelling. He has changed little in the plot, although the retired professor is now an ageing screenwriter. The pervasive dour atmosphere is efficiently conveyed through a laconic, almost terse, rendering of Chekhov’s lines. Minor characters, notably Vanya’s mother and the family friend usually known as Waffles, are often forgotten and might just as easily have been cut completely; but the great monologues – of which there are many in this play – are attractively shaped and resonant with contemporary anxieties.

Scott wears an eye-catching bright-blue, short-sleeved shirt. It is an incongruous bit of costuming, but rather than give the play a holiday atmosphere, it suggests the lurid blue-green patina of weathered copper. It is an absurd symbol for the way Vanya’s life is tarnished and all his brightness worn off. In one corner of the set is a piano, which is a permanent memorial for Vanya’s dead sister, whose ghostly presence is emphasised in this production. Behind the piano is a curious sphere on a platform, which might have something to do with the moon, but looks more like the mysterious sphere in Dürer’s Melancholy.

This is a quiet, nocturnal sort of production. The accents that Scott uses are mostly Irish, but Simon Stephens has given a surreal twist to many of the details in Chekhov’s original. The doctor, who is an amateur conservationist, now speaks of the disappearance of blue-winged warblers. And when the old screenwriter and his wife eventually decamp, they head for Lille in France. So where in the world are we? The set suggests the narrowness of life on the estate; Scott needs to move only a few steps from the door to the sink to the tables. And yet when the doctor shows off his maps of the region, the whole vast stage is illuminated with images of wildfires and blood-red skies. It all adds to the feeling that this is nothing but the dream of a damaged soul in a small room.

Scott’s layered performance is very fine, but I wonder if this production doesn’t revel too much in the play’s melancholy. Where is the struggle? Where is the encouragement to resist all that hopelessness? What is it all for, Scott’s world-weary grin and soulful brown eyes? Are we only to be seduced by this display of charming lassitude? Even the final scene, where Sonya declares that it is only through hard work that we can find any satisfaction in life, falls flat. In the enclosed world suggested by this production, it is impossible to believe that Sonya and Vanya really have any work. Or no work worth doing, in any case. It’s just more self-delusion.

Vanya (National Theatre Live) opens nationally in Palace Theatres on 8 March.