With no attachment to Chekhov's 1895 original, Dominic DiNezza reviews Anya Reiss' version of The Seagull and finds it severely lacking.
Anya Reiss has had issues with The Seagull. When interviewed on A Younger Theatre earlier this week she confessed to having previously thought it “classical and dull”, so this new version directed by Russell Bolam suggests a voyage of discovery for Chekhov enthusiasts, newbies and the playwright herself.
The company boasts rising stars Joseph Drake and Lily James as doomed lovers Kostya and Nina, whose fractious, passionate young dalliance is cleaved in half by the arrival of Trigorin (Anthony Howell), who arouses intense jealousy in the young man and inflames the passion of his sweetheart. The supporting cast includes Malcolm Tierney (the elderly patriarch Sorin) and Matthew Kelly (the genial family friend Dr Dorn), so this Seagull seems well-prepared to soar.
The setting is described in the text as follows:
"I think Sorin's estate is on the Isle of Man, maybe it's not… but that's where I think it is.”
It's hard to usefully deduce much from this alone. An enthusiast might describe it as a refreshing rejection of theatrical convention. A cynic might say it sounds slapdash. It is an omen.
We know that Reiss wants to remould the play so it makes sense in a modern context - in the interview mentioned above she tells us so – and her context is an isolated British island in 2012. It must be 2012 or thereabouts because Nina has an iPod, dissolute Masha puffs a joint in the opening scene and Kostya pens his anguished-yet-recognised plays on a laptop.
And that's it. That’s the modern context. There are virtually no references to modern society, media, politics, even technology. This entire version could be set at any point post-1920 and would have to change virtually nothing. At times it's like watching a modern-dress staging of the original play, with a slightly ropey translation.
Why ropey? Because the subtextual baby has been thrown out with the contextual bathwater. There’s no sense of the wider world in which the characters are living, so throwaway overstatements like “You’re the greatest writer this country has, by far,” leave you screaming 'ON WHAT BASIS?!?!' We are baldly told of emotional undercurrents, so revelations of unrequited love come as a genuine surprise. The dialogue is soapy, uninventive, neither sufficiently faithful nor original, just some shrill, unlikeable characters existing in a world that, frankly, has been constructed in a shockingly lazy and careless way.
Bizarrely, however, this adaptation could still have part-survived. Kelly and Tierney do manage to find some consistency and poignancy, Sasha Waddell mines some effective menopausal angst as Arkadina and Jean Chan’s backlit backdrop is atmospheric if underused.
Bolam, however, also seems to find 'attention to detail' a dirty phrase, which is surprising given the flack that the West End Vanya has received for being too over-stuffed. Actors occasionally correct each other in mid-sentence (no, it's not scripted), superfluous action feels distracting and over-choreographed and the stage-management is shoddy – the staging of a door being locked and subsequently opened in Act Four is frankly embarrassing to watch.
He’s also managed to bring about some genuinely poor performances. Drake’s two-tone Kostya is either whining (think Matt Smith’s Doctor Who at his most petulant) or staring glassily into the near-distance, and Howell is frankly wooden, and seems genuinely pleased to be reminded (as indeed happens all-too-often) that he’s a famous writer. Neither suggest charisma, passion or even that they’re particularly artistic, which makes the vacillation of James’ slightly more engaging but nevertheless identikit teenager Nina a genuine mystery.
Elsewhere, characters seem to have been retained as a token gesture, with the perfectly able actors totally wasted – it may be possible to write a sparky and relevant modern-day play featuring a drunken estate manager, but I don’t know why you’d bother and it certainly doesn’t work here.
Two concluding quotes from Reiss on adaptation:
“you don’t need to worry about plot”
“all the hard work is done for you”
…that should tell you everything you need to know about this Seagull, which demonstrates a cynical and careless absence of both.
The Seagull runs at Southwark Playhouse until 1st December.
Image by Ben Carpenter
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