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Unusually, in Steven Pimlott's production of Chekhov's The Seagull the lakeside play-within-the-play is delivered upstage, so that we see the faces of the on-stage audience and observe Konstantin controlling the technical effects and conduction Nina's performance. It is a good idea. But it also occurs to me that the whole production could have been Konstantin's work, so insistently does it convey the idea of somebody up there pulling the strings.
Chekhov's characterisation famously combines empathy with scientific detachment; but in this show he is firing only on the second cylinder. It is not that Pimlott is wrong about any of the characters? He knows precisely what makes them tick. The trouble is that they are allowed no scope to do anything else. Shamraev (Steven Beard) is genial until anyone asks him for a horse. Konstantin (Ed Stoppard) is ravenous for love and acclaim. Push the button and out comes the expected response.
Where directorial choice is exercised, it is usually to the characters' discredit. Instead of being romantically swept away by Nina, Philip Quast's Trigorin has her briskly over the breakfast table. When Nina (Alexandra Moen) confesses she still loves Trigorin, it is with the calculated purpose of wounding Konstantin. In the case of Sheila Gish's Arkadina, a raucous monstre théâtrale battling for her sexual survival, the negative image is definitive. So too, surprisingly, is Michael Feast's Dorn, justly transformed from a sympathetic onlooker to a cold-hearted little dandy, bullying his discarded daughter and snapping up what few sexual favours still come his way.
In line with Phyllis Nagy's abrasive new text, the prevailing tone of the show is harshly comic; except at those moments when Desmond Barrit's Sorin, like a slumbering doormouse, reawakens to the life around him and resets the perennial Chekhovian values.
