… you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.
I begin this review with the same quotation (from one of Chekhov’s letters) that Anya Reiss uses as the epigraph to her modernised adaptation of The Seagull. This revised version was first staged a decade ago at the Southwark Playhouse, and it is now revived in a free, sparse and intimate production by Jamie Lloyd. The quote pre-empts the declaration famously attributed to Einstein that goes (in one of many variations of phrasing), ‘If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.’ For Reiss to invoke it here marks a statement of intent about the limits of theatre (and art), concerns to which this adaptation is particularly attuned. The production has been marketed with the provocative lines ‘We need theatre, couldn’t, couldn’t do without it. Could we?’ That stumbling note of uncertainty about theatre’s value haunts the drama and is a particularly bracing statement to hear on a West End stage.
This is not medicinal theatre, prescribed by the doctor-turned-playwright, but merely the first step in diagnosis. Its efficacy is up for prolonged debate. In Jamie Lloyd’s hands, Reiss’s script becomes The Seagull anatomised, an almost scientific stab at stating the problems it raises correctly by placing the characters in a bell jar with woodchip walls, for observation and study.
The effect far from the traditional sense of a play being performed for us (as Konstantin might decry of Russia’s dull, conventional theatre). Instead, it is as if we are eavesdropping on intimate conversations, the tiniest shifts in vocal inflection altering the entire meaning. Lloyd’s signature close microphones highlight and amplify every glottal stop and half-breath in shivering detail. It is something of a cliché (though this does not make it wrong) in Chekhov criticism that characters say exactly how they feel, their tragedy being that no one listens or cares. This remains true in the case of Masha and perhaps Shamrayev and Arkadina. However, a spellbinding intimacy radiates from scenes with Nina, Konstantin and Trigorin, almost as powerful as that which Lloyd fostered in Cyrano de Bergerac (a show inevitably about the power of language and listening over the visual). This Seagull highlights where the play does involve listening, the quiet, intense conversations highlighted, as we hear every word and half-formed sentence. One of the most touching moments of the play is where Nina and Trigorin’s stilted communication blossoms into life, as she finds romantic articulacy in his own words – using a quote from her favourite book of his to convey her feelings.
Emilia Clarke makes a good West End debut in a production she headlines but rarely defines. This is largely due to the nature of the role and the direction. That this is an ensemble drama is made all the more evident in the staging; every character is onstage throughout, other when they troop out through the stalls before the interval. It is Indira Varma as the more experienced actor Arkadina who is the ostensible lead, for whom success has come at a cost to her soul, though she would never want to admit it. She persists on acidic wit, a pressure valve that releases her pungent dissatisfaction with life without flaring into anger, Varma capturing her judgemental forcefulness with a brilliant precision.
This production explores the play’s central dichotomy of Trigorin and Konstantin as a contrast of emotionless technical determination with naïve though admirable passion for the new – art that consumes and exhausts versus art which renews. Only love, it argues, can transcend the monotony and bathos of an ordinary life. It is notable how both artistic visions appear to succeed ever more during the gap between Act 3 and 4, Trigorin’s sales and fame continuing to grow while Konstantin, less of a commercial hit though he is, gathers a strong cult following. Both artistic visions (arguably at times manifestos) are apparently successful, yet both culminate in forms of failure. Trigorin’s life is skeletal; he picks the bones of his existence – including all sensory pleasure – for inspiration. He is plagued by anxiety during the time he is not at a desk writing. Konstantin, meanwhile, is shattered by a life pursuing artistic fulfilment, only to realise that theatre cannot provide him with what he truly yearns for. This is The Seagull retooled as an aching warning about the hollowness of celebrity.
This, in Konstantin’s case fatal, disenchantment pervades the original play, and this sense only increases in the spotlit emptiness of Soutra Gilmour’s set (with lighting from Jackie Shemesh). The play’s more stylised choices play out well, with a strange but successful juxtaposition of acting styles on display – from mumblecore intensity to almost parodic melodrama. For example, Sophie Wu’s Masha intones her despairing dialogue in a resigned monotone, but this is no mere caricature of the famously dour part. She is caught in a state of mourning for her own life, surrendering to her glum, stymied existence through a form of dissociation – a sharply modern interpretation that aptly matches Chekhov’s characterisation. Her sadness is all-pervasive, yet it also seems separate from her. To mourn one’s life you must be somehow outside of it. By this point, Masha is simply numb.
The second half is composed of a protracted interpretation Act 4, giving this Seagull a lopsided quality that seems quite deliberate. While Acts 1 to 3 take place over a matter of days, this Act 4 occurs a whole six years on. (In the original, it is only two.) With time has come exhaustion rather than flowering, Lloyd slowing the pace to expose how the characters’ pains, flaws and suffering have been reified by the wide gap of time, rather than soothed or overcome. The scenes have the phantom stillness of Beckett. On its own, this act has shades of the more hopeless plays of Ioensco; it is a ‘comedy’ on the cusp of tilting into pure tragedy. Significantly, the set itself changes; the back wall is removed. The MDF gives way to an empty black void. Yet even more powerful is the, at first, imperceptible change in props; one of the chairs has been removed, forcing Nina and Konstantin to share one too small seat their agonising final conversation.
The bingo game from the original Act 4 is adapted (and distended) by Reiss into a rambling game of charades. It brilliantly gives a hilarious chance for Dorn to call out Shamrayev’s bubbling cruelty and anger, in his mime for 12 Angry Men. Yet it is also a choice of startling thematic appropriacy. It makes a game out of the serious business of pretence, a theatrical impulse taken to hollow, empty ends. What is contemporary theatre but similar game, Konstantin has been implicitly asking in the first play. What is life, the play responds, but a charade? This production particularly weighs Chekhov’s debate and questioning of the deadening effects of realism on theatre, while also conceiving of real life itself as a form of deadly theatre.
Konstantin’s gleam of idealism is perhaps what undoes him here. He seems mirrored with both Nina and Masha, except Nina has just enough of hope’s spark to survive, while Masha has so little hope whatsoever that suicide would seem an ill-fitting reaction. She has no energy or passion to make anything happen in her life, even hastening its end. It is Konstantin who cannot suffer life’s knocks one time more – finding his burgeoning career to be insufficient for spiritual succour.
Reiss dispenses with the play’s notoriously bathetic final line, in which Dorn interrupts to inform the surviving characters that Konstantin has shot himself. The play ends as the comedy stops for good. Here though, Dorn trails off: ‘The fact is… um… Konstantin’s…’ The script suggests he mimes a gun to his head, rather than speak the words, but Gerald Kyd’s gestures are subtler. Lloyd’s tone is sufficiently apocalyptic, the play and its ending are so famous (containing, of course, the textbook example of Chekhov’s gun), and Dorn has so achingly lost articulacy that the words need not be spoken. Konstantin’s story has come to an end.
The Seagull
Written by Anya Reiss, after Anton Chekhov, Directed by Jamie Lloyd, Set and Costume Design by Soutra Gilmour, Lighting Design by Jackie Shemesh, Sound and Composition Design by George Dennis, Casting Direction by Stuart Burt CDG, Costume Supervision by Anna Josephs, Props Supervision by Fahmida Bakht, Associate Direction by Jonathan Glew, Associate Design by Rachel Wingate, Starring Emilia Clarke, Tom Rhys Harries, Daniel Monks, Indira Varma, Sophie Wu, Jason Barnett, Robert Glenister, Mika Onyx Johnson, Gerald Kyd, Sara Powell, Understudies Katie Buchholz, Tina Harris, Joseph Langdon and David Lee-Jones
Production Photographs by Marc Brenner
Reviewed 29th August 2022
Joshua Robey 