Adelaide Festival. State Theastre Scenic Workshop. 26 Feb 2014
Chekhov wrote and agonised over The Seagull in the 19th Century but steadily it has reverberated through the ensuing times and trends. As do Chekhov's characters.
It's a glorious classic and hard to undermine.
‘The Seagull’ is a play about the process and players of the play. It has a play in the play. It is about theatre writers and prima donnas. It is about age, love, caprice and fatalism. It is about class and kindness, age and reason.
For the Adelaide Festival 2014, Geordie Brookman has cast his predecessor as STC artistic director, Rosalba Clemente, in the starring role of Arkadina, the highly-strung ageing stage star who is both matriarch and monster.
For the logistics of the Festival and Adelaide's growing shortage of theatres, he has staged the production in the STC's Scenic Workshop - in the bowels of the Festival Centre. This space was used last Festival for Tolstoy's ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, most triumphantly saved at the eleventh hour when Renato Musolino stepped into the role vacated by Sydney actor Barry Otto. For audiences, it was a vertiginous experience in one steep rake of bleachers - but the production shone.
This space works less well for ‘The Seagull’.
Here the seating has been split into two high rakes either side of a long rectangle. One looks down on a simple wooden stage with raised platforms at each end. In effect, the players are working two audiences. The result is that one sees a lot of backs and profiles of actors and gets the feeling that there is a preferred side. Since the tiers of seats are tall, one also sees a lot of tops of head.
There is one other handicap from this structure. It is an acoustic wasteland. The direction of sound often seems lost, quality muffled and muted to the ears of those aloft. Some dialogue is hard to distinguish. Do those actresses have poor pitch or are their voices dulled by their surroundings?
Hence, much of the play is an uphill, or should one say, upwards, audience challenge.
But, even while weeping for a more compatible venue, the play survives.
There are some utterly golden moments.
The actors establish their characters. The moods prevail and so does the weather, with the offstage howl of an old-fashioned wind-machine and the actors taking "snow" from their pockets to toss over their heads. This dear old shtick adds sweet levity to the wickedness of a Russian rural storm.
The play has funny streaks to it and Brookman has elicited many. It also has cruelty - and timeless cameos of what we love to call "the human condition".
There's the patience of the end of life in old Sorin who is delivered with the usual impeccability of Paul Blackwell and the jaded care of poor farm-bound Polina. She's a small role in the play but one which is distinguished in the hands of Lizzy Falkland. Hers is the best voice to survive the conditions of the venue.
Matilda Bailey in her country girl stomping boots serves well as the lovelorn serving girl, Masha, capturing the sense of poignancy with a comic edge. And, Matthew Gregan, composer, musician and her hapless suitor Medvedenko, is stand-out. One loves him to the core of compassion. But not as much as Xavier Samuel who earns audience love adorned with aching pity in his embodiment of the aspiring writer, Konstantin, stuck in the country, ever seeking the approval of his volatile Moscow-based stage star mother. An incisive performance.
One of the great moments of the play is the mother-son clash wherein, after demeaning him with torrents of criticism, his mother tries to catch him and cradle away the abject misery she creates. From both Samuel and Clemente, as the mother, this is a vividly-delivered scene.
Clemente, in a glamor of rich plum and red costumes, her raven hair immense, gives Arkadina her all. At times some of this is lost to inaudibility. Similarly hampered is Lucy Fry as Nina, the vapid and ambitious young beauty who stirs the men and irks the women. In a series of lovely 1950s sunfrocks, designed by Ailsa Paterson, she is a poised and highly arresting stage presence.
Terence Crawford , Chris Pitman and Renato Musolino turn in their usual fine well-seasoned work bringing the classic sense of Chekhov family and community to life . And, even perched under the ceiling fans on the wrong side of the theatre, one shares that claustrophobic sense of their isolation and a fatalistic ennui.
Perhaps the most expressive of all this, the most perfectly captured spirit of Chekhov, is in the scene of silence, when a seagull has just flown over, "an angel" as it is seen, and they in their world just stop for a moment. In that pause, there is everything.
Samela Harris
When: 25 Fen to 16 Mar
Where: State Theastre Scenic Workshop – Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
