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The SeagullDateline: 29th November, 1998
The Seagull Ian McKellen moved from London to the WYP in Leeds to, as it were, get back to his acting roots. He wanted to play in a smaller, more intimate theatre, to an audience other than the London middle-class houses of the National and other such venues. In the newly-formed Courtyard Company he is working in a small-scale house - 350 seats - to a northern audience (although as to whether or not it could be described as working class I have my doubts!), with a group of eleven actors who have committed themselves to the company for six months. The Seagull is the first of three productions in which he will play. It runs until 5th December, after which he will play Garry Essendine in Coward's Present Laughter (10th December to 23rd January) and Prospero in The Tempest from 28th January to 27th February). The Seagull production opened at the end of October to good - even, on occasion, rave - reviews. It's now approaching the end of its run, with a week to go, so now seems a good time to take another look at it. One or two of the party I was with wondered why it was being presented as a traverse production, with the audience on two sides of the stage. There are, I think, two reasons. The first is that it makes the whole experience much more intimate: we are physically closer to the action and therefore the sense of involvement is greater. But you cannot but be aware of the other members of the audience sitting opposite, even if only peripherally, providing a constant reminder that we are watching a play. We cannot be seduced into believing that what we see in front of us is "realistic". That is important. On hearing, at a reheasal for the play in 1898, that there were to be "realistic" sound effects, Chekhov objected: The stage is art. There's a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be "realistic", but the picture would be ruined. As always when I go to a play, I unashamedly listen to other people's comments and here I heard quite a few about the lack of realism in movement, particularly in regard to the performances of Claire Swinburne as Masha and Timothy Walker as Trigorin. At first such comments have a superficial validity when viewed in terms of naturalistic theatre, but if you play Chekhov in a naturalistic manner, what you succeed in doing is making it "weepy", something which Chekhov hated. As he wrote to one correspondent; You write that you wept at my play. You are not the only one. I wanted something quite different. All I wanted to say, quite honestly, was: "Look at yourselves, just how stale and tedious your lives are..." What is there to weep at in that? Chekhov wrote comedy. The title page of the play is "A Comedy in Four Acts". We laugh at his characters, but it is a sad kind of laughter. Remember Vanya's attempted shooting of Serebriakov? So much passion, so much anguish, and he misses! We laugh - or at least we do if the production gets it right. It's like the three sisters' longing for Moscow. They'll never go: we know that. The lives of Chekhov's characters are not tragic, for tragedy implies hope. There is no hope for them: their lives are almost ridiculous in their struggles to escape for the humdrum and tedious. In The Seagull Constantin is absolutely right in his search for "new forms" of theatre, but what he actually produces is laughable. A kind of febrile dissatisfaction characterises the lives and actions of most of his characters - Konstantin, Masha, Sorin, Medvedenko, Nina - but even when they get what they wanted, it isn't what they thought it would be. In fact, it's worse: Medvendenko marries Masha and she makes him even more miserable; Nina goes on the stage and is desperately unhappy: Konstantin achieves some success as a writer, but it brings him no satisfaction. The same is true even of those who have what they want from the start: Arkadina and Trigorin frantically cover up their unhappiness. The real centre of the play is Dr Dorn. He is the centre because he stands outside of the turmoil and agony. He is the observer, the oasis of calm in the middle of so many storms. It is significant that he has the last word, taking Trigorin to one side and quietly and calmly telling him to take Arkadina away - "The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovitch has shot himelf..." Ian McKellen plays Dorn, and his performance is at variance with the intensity of those around him. He is quiet, a smile almost continually on his face. His gestures are small, contrasting with intensity of the other characters and well suited to the intimacy of the staging. His voice is quiet and calm. At times, in fact, one almost has to strain to hear him. Passions swirl around him like whitewater around a rock. Dorn is the only one with nothing to prove to himself - and it shows, in every movement and gesture he makes and every word he says. It was a superb performance. Peter Laird captured the character of Sorin beautifully, his occasional petulance, his regret for a life wasted contrasting so well with the obvious love felt for him by the other characters. With its constant resorting to catchphrases, it is an easy part to overplay and reduce to caricature, but Peter Laird got it just right. Claire Higgins' Arkadina also avoided caricature. We caught glimpses in her of the real woman behind the façade, the woman which she held firmly in check so that the image would not be dented, even in private with those nearest and dearest to her. The bandaging scene in Act III between her and Konstantin was a triumph of subtlety in which the mother and actress vied with each other, and the actual bandaging itself, in which she wrapped the bandage round her son's head like a dancer around a maypole, summed up for me this very complex character. It is so easy to play Nina as a wimp, a swooning ingenue, or one of those 1930s sub-Isadora Duncan girls wafting around in floating white costumes and being desperately arty. But she isn't: there is steel in her, even at the beginning. There is never any doubt that she will "go on the stage". Claudie Blakley caught this hard inner core whilst still showing the character's innocence. For they are two sides of the same coin, this innocence and steel, and she had them to the last. In her momentous return in Act IV they were still there. Their proportions were changed, but, in spite of the hard outer coating (shown in hair, dress and voice), she was the same girl but now well on the road to being another Arkadina, with her real passion (for Trigorin) bubbling under the hard surface of the actress she had become. This is an ensemble production - which is how Chekhov ought to be played - and it worked well. It's a fine start to the three play season and although I doubt whether I'll manage to get to the Coward, I'll certainly make every effort to see The Tempest. Weaknesses? Yes, there were some. I still cannot figure out why Shamaev had a Geordie accent (except that Willie Ross it is Geordie and I've never seen him play anything other) and his daughter had what sounded to me to be vaguely Manchester. It's not a major fault - and there might even be some explantion for it: I can think of one or two - but it did grate, and grated unnecessarily. It was something of a distraction. There was one character missing - the lake. Talking to his publisher, Suvorin, Chekhov described the play as being a comedy, three female parts, six male, four acts, landscape (view of a lake). The lake is important - the programme uses a view of a lake as a background for the credits page - but it wasn't there. It couldn't be, actually, given the traverse staging, but the imagery of the lake and the seagull pervade the play and the absence of the former does have an effect. But this is quibbling! So, did McKellen make the right move, leaving the bright lights of London for the wilds of Yorkshire? The WYP audience certainly thinks so, and so do I! Articles Indices: |
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