From 26 February to 5 April, the Barbican Theatre hosted showings of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull directed by Thomas Ostermeier. The new adaptation (by Duncan Macmillan and Thomas Ostermeier) produced a remarkable performance with an impressive cast starring Cate Blanchett, Paul Bazely, Tom Burke, Emma Corrin among others. Since the typical period for composing a review has already elapsed surrounding the play, my particular piece serves instead as something of an afterword. This discusses whether the recent adaptation contributes meaningfully to readings and interpretations of the Russian classic.
Staging Chekhov is a recognisable achievement amongst theatrical directors, an indication of the task’s challenging nature. Not all succeed in grasping the depth of Chekhov’s drama, when situated in their comparatively mundane storylines. Ostermeier’s production relates one of Anton Chekhov’s most famous pieces within a contemporary setting. It follows the same old story about love and people.
When Simon (Zachary Hart) tells Masha (Tanya Reynolds) that she cannot escape his love, she replies,
You just watch me.
These attempts to pursue love — be it a parental, romantic or even in nostalgic longing for a past life — is a major leitmotif of The Seagull. It is in this play where Chekov skilfully encapsulates love’s domestic tragedy and, at the same time, its human comicality. Following the unreliable essence of human nature, characters chase feelings they cannot obtain, methodically destroying those they already have. Chekhov’s “people,” according to Lydia Ginzburg, are fundamentally ordinary. They are relatively static, and fixed within their prescribed social conditions of a fading mansion in the late Imperial Russia.
Ostermeier’s “prescribed social conditions” differ from the ones in the original text, adapting themselves to a modern context. This explains why audiences watch Arkádina (Cate Blanchett) flouncing around in kitschy outfits, Masha constantly vaping, and Simon playing Billy Bragg on his electric guitar.
However, to argue an opinion often present in the reviews of The Seagull, it should also be considered that for Chekhov, the main task of an adaptation is not to make the play appear “modern” or understandable to Western audiences. Instead, to revive Chekhov’s characters is to qualitatively change them. Thus, Ostermeier’s rendition is not a theatrical revelation, nor a new reading. Constructing characters with a certain dynamism or reflexivity to their audiences is in fact fundamental for those endeavouring to direct Chekhov.
In the nineteenth century, Russian literature was dominated by the realism genre, with its central principles founded on the unembellished, objective depictions of social phenomena. For Chekhov, however, such an approach was not a tribute to tradition but a downfall, a cliché. Rather, he sought the new visions and faces generated naturally by the course of life. For this reason, many of Chekhov’s classic productions are impossible to comprehend for contemporary audiences. They are often unbearably boring considering Chekhov’s plays are about portraits of people, not action-driven plots. The truth is that audiences simply cannot relate to characters that lived a hundred years ago, which is exacerbated by the lack of a discernible story thread. That is why Chekhov’s plays can and must be adapted to new social conditions, which Ostermeier achieves quite aptly. This, in turn, requires not the actualisation of the material already written by Chekhov but the creation of new characters, unique and distinctive. Chekhov’s play provides directors with a certain freedom by creatively utilising the absolute that certain fundamental human fragments never disappear.
In the interview published in the performance’s programme, Ostermeier said that he wasn’t a big Chekhov fan. He then added that he was not even sure if he was one now. In this respect, I couldn’t agree more, reminiscing the position of Leo Tolstoy, who valued Chekhov as a writer but not as a playwright. Recalling archival quotations about Tolstoy’s opinion of Chekhov’s plays in my translation:
«Если пьяный лекарь будет лежать на диване, а за окном идти дождь, то это, по мнению Чехова, будет пьеса, а по мнению Станиславского — настроение; по моему же мнению, это скверная скука, и, лежа на диване, никакого действия драматического не вылежишь…» // Из письма П. П. Гнедич — Л. О. Гнедич. Автограф. ИРЛИ, ф. 73, ед. хр. 122, л. 25.
“If a drunk doctor lies on a sofa, and it rains outside, in Chekhov’s opinion, it is a play. Stanislavsky would say it is atmosphere. However, I think it is nasty boredom, and one cannot call lying on a sofa a drama.”
Nevertheless, Ostermeier’s The Seagull is comical whilst also being deeply sad. We are all lonely in adolescence and even more so in our old age — and throughout our entire lives in between we are profoundly selfish. The young do not know how to believe in themselves and die of failed romance. The old die without realising their ambitions, with no one to watch over them in their last hours. These eternal truths can be conveyed in different ways, and Ostermeier does so by creating new social conditions and living characters. However, the director still plays it safe. To break a norm, you need to create one. The ethical criteria work from inside the character when something in their thoughts and actions contradicts an existing “ideal model.” In The Seagull, the catharsis of most of the characters lies in quite predictable character portraits.
In this regard, it is important to mention where Ostermeier does bring new readings. This lies in his construction of Chekhov’s female characters and the dynamics between them. Rereading The Seagull before the performance, I once again thought that the figure of Nina followed a relatively normative characterisation for her era. Her role also follows a touch of the ‘damsel in distress’, which generally makes it a branch of a classic tragedy. But this Nina has a certain androgyny and incredibly dramatic transformation throughout the plot that allows the audience to really connect with the character. The same goes for Arkádina and Masha — they are all living women entangled in this strange web of their inner insecurities, concerns and passive rivalry over various men. This brings to mind the prose of Irina Odoyevtseva, whose first poetry collection was published in 1922. Odoevtseva’s prose explores issues of female sexuality, as well as female jealousy and rivalry, including in the context of mothers and daughters. If we read Odoevtseva’s prose compared to that of her male contemporaries, both naturally explore similar themes through different creative techniques. In works where the female characters are written by men, there is often a great risk that the characters will descend into hysterical and caricatured behaviour. Yet that does not happen in The Seagull.
Simultaneously, The Seagull remains a conventional performance. In the above-mentioned interview, Ostermeier characterises himself as a conventional director in the German sense. Indeed, there is nothing avant-garde or “modernist” about The Seagull in this adaptation. I write “modernist” in inverted commas precisely because Chekhov’s work preceded the boom of the most diverse trends in Russian art, which was encapsulated under the umbrella term.
In fact, this is still a classic adaptation of the way Chekhov should be staged. The final touch, in my opinion, extremely important, and therefore ironic and accurate, is “Chekhov’s gun.”
It does not matter whether it is a metaphor for the seagull, which turns into an actual effigy of a play and, if you like, Nina’s character, or a literal shotgun that Konstantin (Kodi Smit-McPhee) drags along the stage. The principle itself boils down to the classic principle of Chekhov’s dramaturgy that if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must go off in the last.
And it does.
