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The battle of the birds starts here. Four days before Peter Stein's Edinburgh Seagull, Steven Pimlott launces his own radical production: one that is comic, colloquial (in Phyllis Nagy's new version) cliche-free and non-naturalistic. It is a bracing antidote to atmosphere-drenched, autopilot Chekhov, yet something of the play's mystery and moral neutrality is sacrificed.
Shocks abound from the start. We are used to the schoolteacher asking a mournful Masha why she always wears black: what we don't expect is to see them in bathing togs just back from a swim. And the surprises continue: a sockless Dorn mounts the false stage that dominates Alison Chitt'y set for a spot of Sinatra-style crooning, and Konstantin's play is both absurd and sexy. I am all for stripping Chekhov of false accretions, yet here tha baby is sometimes flushed out with the bathwater. If Konstantin's play is ridiculous, it makes nonsense of Dorn's delight in it. You also lose something of Chekhov's internal debate on art, in which the symbolically earnest Konstantin is contrasted with the commercially successful Trigorin. As played by Philip Quast,the latter simply emerges as a portly lech who brings the house down when, straddled by a voracious Arkadina, he turns to the audience and cries: "Will power isn't my strongest suit."
Sheila Gish, having recently undergone crucial surgery, is obliged to play Arkadina with an eyepatch which lends her piratical zest of Bette Davis in The Anniversary. But while Gish gives a big, bold, bravura performance, it is the minor characters who benefit most from Pimlott's approach. Desmond Barrit's Sorin dismissed as an "old tart" by Dorn, is a fabulously rich embodiment of a man besotted by Nina's youth, and Darlene Johnson's Polina has a great moment when she savages Nina's floral gift to Dorn with sadisting glee. Alexandra Moen fully justifies Nina's capacity to create sexual havoc, and Ed Stoppard also lends Konstantine a fine Byronic despair.
Time and again Pimlott alerts you to points you ofter overlook. But Nagy's version, with its references to "show-time"' and "piss-awful" plays, is too self-advertising, and Pimlott is so determined to hightlight Checkhov's artifice, especially through the use of brightly lit monologues, that he underplays his symphonic naturalism. See it, for sure, but expect a Seagull with it's wings slightly clipped.
© Guardian Newspapers Ltd.
