‘You never get the sense she’s one of the country’s biggest stars’
Looks, talent and modesty. And the luck to live in a time when actors can prosper. Jasper Rees meets a Russian superstar

A year ago, at an international festival of theatre in Bogota, an actress in a visiting production of Three Sisters was unexpectedly mobbed. Chekhov may indeed be big in Colombia, but the disproportionate media attention lavished on a solitary member of the cast could be explained only by her starring role at home in Russia in Ne Rodis Krasivoi — better known in Bogota as Yo soy Betty, la fea. And to us as Ugly Betty.

There are incarnations in umpteen languages of TV’s orthodontically challenged nemesis of leggy fashionistas. None can have quite as much pedigree as Nelly Uvarova, an actress who, thanks to a long-standing quirk of the Russian repertory system, is currently appearing in 10 different Moscow stage productions. But it is television that has made her one of a new breed of huge young stars across the country’s 11 time zones, where Ne Rodis Krasivoi was seen by audiences of up to 40m. It’s a measure of the show’s frantic shooting schedule that Uvarova regarded the flights to and from South America, plus the four nights of performing Chekhov’s taxing masterpiece, as a bit of a holiday. “I was actually planning to have a rest,” she says, “but because Colombia is the home of the show, they just wouldn’t let me. Absolutely everyone wanted to see and talk to me.”

Uvarova can be assured of a slightly less hysterical greeting when Three Sisters visits the UK. Audiences weaned on English playwrights may well have an aversion to theatre performed in a foreign language. But you might like to consider flogging a granny to get a ticket for this shatteringly good production. Last month, I saw it in Moscow, without the benefit of surtitles (though I did take the precaution of reading a translation the day before). The lights go up on a company of actors who seem utterly to live inside the stricken provincial world of the production’s making, and the three actresses who play Olga, Masha and Irina seem, in some alchemical way, to be indissolubly related.

Three Sisters is the latest Russian foray by the director Declan Donnellan and his Cheek by Jowl company. He has so far grafted his directorial style onto Russian productions of The Winter’s Tale, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and the all-male Twelfth Night that paid a triumphant visit to Stratford last year. Donnellan was recently included in a list of the top 10 Russian theatre directors, but Three Sisters is his first attempt at Chekhov in the playwright’s native language.

Productions of the play are tuppence a dozen in Moscow, but when Cheek by Jowl’s was announced in 2004, Uvarova had to join the queue of actors eager to be in it. “It was very difficult even to get on the list to be seen,” she says, “let alone to be chosen. I wasn’t yet part of the TV series, and nobody knew me.” Donnellan says: “Most of the company, I’ve worked with several times before. But we didn’t have an obvious Irina, and I met her and thought she was just sensational.”

Donnellan’s method took some getting used to. Once cast as Irina, who fervently dreams of moving from the family’s provincial outpost to Moscow, Uvarova duly joined an all-star ensemble of theatrical royalty in a lakeside resort in the middle of nowhere, for a sort of textual boot camp. “It’s rare to come across a director who works so thoroughly on the text,” Uvarova says. “It was surprising to us, because Declan doesn’t know the language. We all thought we knew the play really well, but he turned everything upside down, not just for effect, but to make the conflicts even sharper than they are.”

The cast then disbanded for six months while Donnellan’s schedule took him elsewhere. To a British actor, the caesura might sound eccentric, but Russian rehearsals typically concertina according to the actors’ obligations elsewhere. Uvarova, for example, is in all three parts of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy, which has already been in rehearsal for a year and won’t reach the Moscow stage until September. The old Soviet rep system also ensures that once a production joins a theatre’s 30-strong roster, it can sit there for years, cropping up for sporadic performances. Performing a piece continuously, as the cast of Three Sisters did for a month when the play opened two years ago in Paris, came as a culture shock. “We don’t work that way here,” Uvarova says. “It spoilt us, because we wanted to perform it more and more. It was like a drug.” Two months later, the play did a 10-day run at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow, then disappeared for six months. The night I saw it, they hadn’t performed it for a month. It didn’t show. Or, rather, it did, in the bright freshness of the actors’ naturalism.

The cast will get another fix as they bring the play to Donnellan’s homeland. Many of them have shunted aside film work. Uvarova is slated to film an eight-part television series directed by her husband, and an experimental film with a first-time director. “One of the reasons I love working in Russia is that the actors actually organ-ise their film schedule around our performances and rehearsals,” Donnellan says. “You never get any sense from Nelly that she’s one of the most famous people in Russia. She is incredibly unpretentious. We’re very lucky to have her.”

The luck is not all on his side. Ne Rodis Krasivoi translates as the first half of a Russian proverb: “If you’re not born beautiful, be born lucky.” Uvarova, brought up in Lithuania and Georgia before her parents moved to Moscow when she was 14, was born both: beautiful, with her big, soulful eyes and the slender angularity of her cheekbones; lucky that she has come along at a time when it is finally possible for Russian actors to convert ability into capital. “For many years, if you wanted to earn a living, you had to do all sorts of things,” she says. “You could say theatre was a kind of hobby.”

Added to her looks and luck is a near-photographic memory and a furious work ethic. She recorded all 200 episodes of the Russian Ugly Betty in a single year, five episodes a week. “I didn’t have time at all for any kind of life besides work. I would have gone crazy if I hadn’t had the theatre, but I could jump out of the studio onto the stage and play characters who had absolutely nothing to do with it. In the same period, I even managed to rehearse two new productions.”

Depending on how you count it, The Coast of Utopia makes one or three more. The trilogy, which will be the theatrical event of the year in Moscow, is already running to great acclaim at the Lincoln Center, in New York. Uvarova and the rest of the cast met their US counterparts when the Americans flew to Moscow to absorb something of the Russian atmosphere. She can barely hide her shock that they came for only 24 hours and that they proposed meeting in an American-style diner. Uvarova has now worked with two great men of British theatre. Donnellan has patiently learnt his way around the inner workings of the fabled Russian soul. Stoppard, by his own admission, got all his Russian erudition from books. Does it seem to Uvarova, whose gamine Irina appears to be irradiated with Russianness, that a great foreign writer has managed to unlock the national character?

She is as awed by Stoppard as all actors who come across him, but she laughs as she describes Alexander Herzen’s doomed wife, Natalie, whom she plays in Shipwreck, part two of the trilogy. “I can’t find a single characteristic of a Russian woman in her. To me, she is a creature from a UFO. But it makes it even more interesting. I can add the Russian characteristics myself.”

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