[seagull]

It would be silly to deny the fact that this Flemish sign language take on The Seagull is challenging: the steady stream of punters leaving throughout when I saw it were, I’m sure, not prejudiced against deaf people, but rather struggling with the interval-free two-and-a-half-hour production’s bizarre pace and oft confusing tonal meanderings.

I think certainly it’s probably fair to say that Antwerp’s Olympique Dramatique theatre company has a community-based process that is clearly as much a rationale for the shows as the final result. [seagull] was made in collaboration with members of the Flemish deaf community and features a cast that mixes deaf actors and hearing actors who have learned sign language for their role and effectively play deaf people.

It’s pretty unusual, yes, but if you can adjust to the odd quirks of Stijn Van Opstal’s production and the fact it is very definitely [seagull] rather than The Seagull then it’s actually charming, poignant and quietly loopy.

While many a director likes to indulge the opening scene in which the intense young Konstantin stages an avant-garde play starring the sweet but ambitious Nina, in [seagull] the sequence feels like it takes up about a third of the total runtime. Not because the show overeggs Nina’s performance, which is certainly memorable but over fairly quickly. But the whole of act one is luxuriated over. Characters – from Lobke Leirens’s batshit Masha to Yousra Boukantar’s thoughtful Nina – are introduced slowly. There is a lot of quirky physical business, like the silent comedy style sequence where the expectant play audience move their chair too close to the stage, much to the humourless Konstantin’s chagrin. 

There’s another reason why the first act is the longest. The surtitles initially relay fully fleshed out English sentences, plus some more whimsical visual stuff like a cartoonish sprawl of the word ‘bark’ when a dog starts barking in the background. Later on in the play, the syntax of what’s being relayed to us drastically changes, with the sentences becoming simpler and losing the definite article - presumably it is now a literal translation of the sign language. Exactly why they’ve done it isn’t 100 percent clear dramaturgically, although there’s something very poignant about a despondent Konstantin using language that reads as somewhat childlike to express his melancholy to his mother Arkadina.

But clearly exploring possibilities of deaf performance is the main motivation, as the production switches gears again for a final act - which is usually an hour or so - that is rattled through in maybe 20 minutes. Here the surtitles are off and deaf actor Yana Wuytjens (who plays Konstantin) signs out a description of the entire scene to come, which Leirens translates orally, following which the scene plays out at an almighty clip. 

Does this make for great Chekhov? I mean it has its moments - I loved Boukantar’s wide-eyed, solemn Nina, particularly in the scene where she discusses fame with Serge Vlerick’s atypically square Trigorin. Rather than being a shallow starlet wannabe, she is genuinely annoyed that superstar author Trigorin can’t enjoy his success or appreciate what he means to people - in part she wants to become a star because she feels she could do fame better. 

Let’s be real here: the accelerating pacing is completely bonkers and doesn’t serve the story particularly well - it takes too long to get going and finishes up far too quickly. It’s an experiment in working with a deaf community first and foremost. Even if you yourself are a reader of Flemish sign language, it would come across as pretty eccentric. And of course watching people signing for two-and-a-half hours with no break is going to be challenging for an audience used to spoken theatre and a loo break. But take it all in your stride and eccentric Chekhovian magic abounds, bubbling under the unusual surface.