THE SEAGULL. To 22 August.

Edinburgh

THE SEAGULL
by Anton Chekhov Hungarian translation by Geza Morcsanyi

The Hub To 22 August 2005
7.pm Runs 3hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 0131 473 2000
www.eif.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 August

Thrillingly unconventional - and finally bleaker than Chekhov intended.
A few minutes into Chekhov's first major play the young avant-garde would-be playwright Konstantin talks about the open-air performance of his play, staged in the back-garden for an unlikely audience of his old-style star-actress mother Arkadina and assorted visitors and estate-workers. "No sets, no costumes," he says in the simultaneous English translation spoken into earpieces in Hungarian theatre company Kretakor's production.

It has a rare resonance, for that's exactly how Arpad Schilling's production plays the whole Seagull. It takes several lines to realise the speakers are sitting among the audience, in modern, everyday clothes. Young Masha, wearing black because she's in mourning for a life that can only get worse, could be any one of us gathered round 3-sides of a bare floor-section in the Edinburgh International Festival's Hub HQ. (It's a pity the Hub space is backed by the assertive huge pulpit and carved wooden screen from its ecclesiastical days. A plain surface would have been ideal.)

Schilling's not a dedicated minimalist as Kretakor's explosive free version of Woyzeck, set on a mesh-surrounded building-site, showed in London last month. But this Seagull recreates the fabulous impact of the play's second first-night, when Konstantin Stanislavsky's production showed what had previously seemed vapid to contain the immediacy of life. Like watching people in their own homes, audiences said. Unlike one Edinburgh Fringe company this year, Kretakor don't actually visit homes, but this stripped-bare, dressed-down production's the next best thing.

It exploits the play's theatrical moments. Nina bows, seeking applause after her last-act recall of lines from Konstantin's first-act play. Age-defying Arkadina insists she can still play a 15-year old and proceeds to flirt with a front-row audience member through adolescent blushes and giggles, an act undermined a moment later as she has to stretch a book to arm's-length to read the print.

But it's at the other extreme the production makes its strongest impact. Without a stage or scenery there's no frame to propel dialogue forward. The reason for the show's length is that when the characters lack energy to carry conversation forward, it slowly dies. And, without any need for emphasis, lassitude and unspoken emotion becomes clear.

For Schilling's central success is in unlocking Chekhov's mix of the pace of real-life and the sense of urgency and being purposefully alive theatre can bring. Life here becomes performance. Nina's performance in Konstantin's play has her cutting a way through the onstage viewers and requires them to follow her in promenade fashion out of sight(Arkadina's refusal to budge establishes her unsympathetic response).

But the audience lined up to watch this play treis to reassemble itself. Arkadina unsuccessfully asks her writer-lover Trigorn to move from te back-row and sit beside her at the front. Masha slides back from her unloved sucitor Medvendenko (just as, in the play's real life, she avoids his farewell in the last act.

The soliloquies, left-overs from an older style of playwriting, become natural musings, and it's only at Chekhov's other theatrical moment Schilling cops out, omitting the final suicide and its quiet revelation.

This makes the play bleaker; no emotion-building shock, no feeling for the unknowing Arkadina or chance for Trigorin's sympathetic reaction to Dorn's humane revelation. Just Nina leaving to struggle on and Konstantin left without purpose in life. A charged conclusion becomes emotional nullity. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas Chekhov. Not that we can complain, seeing how British theatre's mangled Shakespeare's endings over the centuries.

'Kretakor' apparently means 'chalk circle.' Let's hope they'll soon be round this way again.

Arkadina: Eszter Csakanyi
Sorin: Jorzsef Gyabronka
Konstantin: Zsolt Nagy
Nina: Annamaria Lang
Trigorin: Tilo Werner
Dorn: Sandor Terhes
Shamrayev: Peter Scherer
Polina: Borbala Peterfy
Masha: Lilla Sarosdi
Medvedenko: Laszlo Katona

Director: Arpad Schilling
Designers: Maron Agh, Tamas Banyai
Lighting: Andras Elteto
Dramaturg: Anna Veress
Assistant director: Peter Toth

2005-08-22 10:54:14