Sigrid Thornton and Harry Greenwood star in The Seagull at Sydney Theatre Company
Sigrid Thornton stars as a manipulative diva in Andrew Upton’s racy new adaptation of The Seagull.
THEATRE
Anton Chekhov and his great director Konstantin Stanislavski notoriously disagreed about whether Chekhov’s plays were tragedies or comedies. The playwright kept defiantly labelling them comedies in protest against what he saw as the director’s gloomy approach.
It is true that most of the characters in all four of the great plays, of which The Seagull is the first, appear to be either utterly miserable or painfully deluded. It is true there is a lot of weeping and more than a few suicide attempts. And it is true that so many productions I have seen seemed to dwell on this that I didn’t particularly want ever to see this play again.
So this thrilling and ultimately moving version, in a racy contemporary adaptation by Andrew Upton and a brilliantly comic production by Imara Savage, is a jolting tonic. It slices neatly between the two sides of the debate and brings us thrillingly and slightly disturbingly back to the old truth, articulated by Samuel Beckett, one of Chekhov’s heirs, that “nothing is funnier than unhappiness”.
It has a great diverse cast playing these miserable misfits. The central characters are collected on a country estate of the sort that became a Chekhovian cliche. They are indolent, dissatisfied and self-indulgent and so they keep, for no good reason that we can see, falling desperately and despairingly in love with each other.
The beautiful actor Irina, played by Sigrid Thornton with a splendidly sensible down-to-earth quality that overthrows the old versions of Irina as a swanning star, knows who she wants and how to keep him. It is the glib writer Boris, deceptively introduced in Toby Schmitz’s performance as a quietly interesting, moderately successful writer but emerging later as a complex, creepy cad.
Boris is loved by Nina, who is loved by Constantine, who is loved by Masha. If it sounds more like a soap opera than a Chekhov then that is what it could be, but under Savage’s direction it becomes more interesting than that.
Mabel Li’s Nina is impishly self-interested, easily switching her passion from Constantine to Boris, but she is also lonely and ambitious. Harry Greenwood’s Constantine is neurotic and self-absorbed, a bit of a wanker in his artistic ambitions and his adoration of Nina, but he is also in real pain. Irina is his mother and there is a lot of Oedipal Hamlet stuff we at first laugh at.
Megan Wilding’s Masha is very funny as the black-clad depressive who yearns for Constantine but settles for someone less interesting. Wilding is a brilliant comic performer.
There is another collection of characters outside this central five, all finely played. There is the decent schoolteacher Masha settles for (Arka Das); the doctor Dorn, a sort of raisonneur figure (Markus Hamilton); the estate owner Peter, Irina’s increasingly decrepit brother (Sean O’Shea), and; the estate managers, who become something like rock roadies in a touch that feels a bit random (Michael Denkha and Brigid Zengeni).
The whole thing is performed on a set by David Fleischer, with arid grasslands and drab timber structures you could not even call rooms or buildings. The famous lake behind the stage for Constantine’s play within the play is switched to front of house. It might be a dream.
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, except for those who are unhappy. In the moving final act the jokes fall away and we see these poor suffering people spread out in a line facing their futures. Sound designer Max Lyandvert has a beautifully understated choral score underpinning the entire act. Nina and Constantine have a newly mature final scene together. Nina says you have to endure.
One of them doesn’t.
Tickets: $57-$109. Bookings: online. Duration: 2hr 50min, including interval. Until December 16.
