THE SEAGULL. To 23 August.
Edinburgh International Festival
THE SEAGULL
by Anton Chekhov translated by Peter Stein from Constance Garnett
King's Theatre To 23 August 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 23 2.30pm
Runs 3hr 30min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 August
It takes flight but without the expected grace.No-one's done more for Chekhov in Edinburgh (or for International Festival drama overall) in recent years than German director Peter Stein. He's come last to the earliest of the Russian playwright's great plays, and if this is not quite the knockout hoped for, nor is it the best play to climax the sequence.
Too advanced for the commercial theatre of its day, maybe, The Seagull nowadays shows more throwbacks to old times than the three later, greater plays.
There are the soliloquies, for one, and the unexplained plot-twist whereby, for no reason the house-party at aging old-style actress Arkadina's house suddenly stays on (it may be to do with horses, but never seems clear in productions). Anyway, it's that delay in departing that causes the denouement 2 years on.
Stein, like Philip Prowse before him, takes the time hint to place the interval after the third of the 4 acts. It makes for over 2 hours to the interval (it doesn't feel anything like so long.)
So far, so wonderful. But, while Chekhov began playwrighting with brief farces and even in his final drama The Cherry Orchard includes (as British director Mike Alfreds once detailed to me) plenty of non-naturalistic, comic moments and devices, there are losses as well as gains in the way Stein has finally taken with the earlier play.
Theatricality is quietly emphasised by a staging stripped-back to the King's bare walls, and artifice by a huge screen which shifts angle in each act. At first, facing us, it's put to realistic use for a projection of the lake against which young Konstantin's experimental drama is acted al fresco.
Even here, though, realism's not left alone, with the image fading to neutrality following the play's sudden closing. That huge screen is kept prominent by its shifts during visible scene-changes, and bursting into sudden second-act film of a seagull in flight, it asserts its own artificiality.
This contrasts a different aritifice, one informing - and by act 3 pretty near ruining - Fiona Shaw's Arkadina. At first, her restlessness is just part of a wider incomprehension among the on-stage audience at the 'new drama' Konstantin offers.
There are later fine points - her inability to listen to Dorn reading to her, sharp fury at Trigorin's preferring fishing to her company. But her 're-seduction' of the famous writer, shouting and gesticulating, would have had Iain Glen's quietly controlled Trigorin, with his writer's precise observation, running versts to escape, rather than rolling on the floor with her in comfortless passion. Without will he might be, but this display fools no-one.
Cillian Murphy sets out her son's artistic sights, speaking before his play with emphasis on the need for new forms of theatre. It's something emphasised by his piano accompaniment to Nina's speech - a literal melodrame.
It seems to have hit home, given Arkadina's sudden spurt of anger after she's wrecked the show with seeming innocence. And the uneasy relation continues - in the way, for example, he slips from her lap when argument breaks out while she's re-bandaging his wounded head.
Jodhi May's Nina shows promise as an actress from the start; by the final act her deep voice and calm resolution are already taking her forward as an independent person.
But the finest perfomrance - also, the most comprehensible within recent English Cherkhov-playing - is Michael Pennington's Doctor. Stroking the words, giving a Chekhovian thought to all he says, commenting without intruding, it's a masterly performance.
Overall, this is an achievement. Crises occur as other people shift furniture in the background - that's Chekhovian life, well caught.
And, though the third act fandangoes pull too far from reality, the end also captures this mood. It's absolutely gripping, as Arkadina, relievedly believing the lie that conceals knowledge of her son's death from her, continues playing in a card game that seems to be going on all evening, lights fading on this world as numbers are softly called out. That's a master director handling a world-class script.
Medvedenko: Elliot Cowan
Masha: Charlotte Emerson
Shamraev: Tom Georgeson
Trigorin: Iain Glen
Sorinh: Paul Jesson
Nina: Jodhi May
Housemaid: Janine Mellor
Polina: Dearbhla Molloy
Konstantin: Cillian Murphy
Dorn: Michael Pennington
Arkadina: Fiona Shaw
Yakov: Ronnie Simon
Cook: Jordan Young
Director: Peter Stein
Designer: Ferdinand Wogerbauer
Lighting: A J Weissbard
Sound: Ferdinando Nicci
Composer: Arturo Annecchino
Costume: Anna Maria Heinreich
Assistant director: Constanze Albert
2003-08-20 18:53:10