The Seagull
By Anton Chekhov
Translated by Oleg Bichenkov, Anatoly Frusin and Neil Armfield
Directed by Neil Armfield
Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, until April 13
Review by Allen Myers
"Unrequited love's a bore", according to the song. Not in this case. In The Seagull, unrequited love makes the world go 'round. And it puts a very entertaining spin on things in this engaging production.
The play is set on a country estate during a summer holiday. If you thought that your own family had invented the Family Summer Holiday from Hell, you'll be surprised to discover that it already existed in 1890s Russia.
Kostya (Noah Taylor) and his uncle (Don Reid) are permanent residents of the estate — not by choice but by economic constraint. Kostya's mother Irina (Gillian Jones) is a famous actress whose success somehow doesn't provide her with sufficient funds to assist either her son or her brother to make their way in urban society.
Irina has brought with her her lover, the famous writer Boris Trigorin (Richard Roxburgh). Trigorin's success is salt in the self-inflicted wounds of Kostya, who aspires to be a writer — especially when Nina (Cate Blanchett), the object of Kostya's affections, is attracted to Trigorin.
This quadrilateral of shifting and misplaced affections (including that between mother and son) is the centrepiece, but virtually everyone in the play is in love with the wrong person. (Indeed, even an offstage guard dog appears to be enamoured with the sound effects in the first act's play within a play.) Love here is often not so much unrequited as misunderstood or overlooked, as the characters pursue their own goals with almost total disregard of those around them.
The resulting conflicts and cross purposes provide considerable humour in a script that would otherwise come perilously close to descending into soap opera. Also important here are uniformly fine performances in the supporting parts.
This production has attracted some attention as the vehicle for Noah Taylor's "transition" from screen to stage. The Sydney Morning Herald critic was scathing about Taylor — unfairly, I think (though I saw the performance on a different night). Taylor's performance is certainly low key (in keeping with Chekhov's plaint, quoted in the program notes, about the original production: "They act a lot ... I wish there was not so much acting.") But if you can put out of mind The Year My Voice Broke and the young Helfgott from Shine, Taylor's Kostya is a quite convincing talented but uncertain and selfish young man.
Although there are no overtly political references in the play, the mood of middle-class frustration, impotence and pointlessness is so palpable you can almost see the insurgent workers and peasants gathering around the borders of the estate. Particularly pathetic is the uncle, now at the end of his distinguished career in the public service, looking back on his life and deciding it was wasted.
This feeling of a society in decay is perhaps another reason that the production still seems so contemporary.