There’s a tendency to forget that The Seagull is intended to be a comedy. This classic play flies in the face of the public’s perception of gloomy ol’ Russian dramatist Anton Chekov, but it was in fact director Konstantin Stanislavski who reframed the action as drama in his 1898 production. Given the play’s initial run was a catastrophic failure, and that Stanislavski’s is still regarded as an epochal production, the die was cast. Happily, Sydney Theatre Company’s final production of the 2023 season has gone back to the original intent, and modernised the language and context – which will drive purists up the wall, but works wonders in terms of breathing fresh life into the material.
The orthodox take on The Seagull is great, of course; no argument there. But make some time for adapter (and former STC creative director) Andrew Upton’s and director Imara Savage’s more heretical version – it’s a banger.
Sigrid Thornton's Irina would be right at home lounging under a large hat in a North Shore brunch spot...
Instead of “modernised” we should perhaps say “Australianised” – the lakeside country estate that provides the play’s setting could be a luxuriously rustic Central Coast getaway, and the cast of characters a typical collection of Eastern Suburbs artistes and culture vultures. There’s struggling and pretentious artist Constantine (Harry Greenwood), resentful of living in the shadow of his distant mother, Irina (Sigrid Thornton), a famous actress. There’s her partner, popular mid-lit author Boris (Toby Schmitz), who dimly grasps his own creative limitations, but enjoys the lifestyle it affords him. Constantine pines for aspiring actress Nina (Mabel Li), casting her in his experimental play, but she’s a fan of Boris – and he just loves the attention. A scattering of locals, such as Megan Wilding’s grumpy goth girl take on Masha, and Irina’s elder brother Peter (Sean O’Shea), who pines for the city life he left behind years ago, round out the ensemble. Each character wrestles with their own regrets, resentments, and petty jealousies – because it’s Chekhov, y’know?
But if we’re going to throw a spotlight on one thematic element, it’s the depiction of the creative struggle. Constantine anguishes over his own artistic endeavours while both deriding and coveting Irina and Boris’s mainstream success – and the metatextual joke of Harry “son of Hugo Weaving” Greenwood playing a character languishing in a more famous parent’s shadow is pretty stark. That’s not a slam, mind you – Greenwood is a prodigious talent, and he's fantastic here. Upton and Savage delight in skewering the creative class in this one: their eccentricities and pretentions, their passions and insecurities.
To that end, we get the showiest turn of the production from Australia's darling of stage and screen, Sigrid Thornton, whose Irina would be right at home lounging under a large hat in a North Shore brunch spot. In a play known for its surfeit of dialogue and lack of action, Thornton gets many of the best lines and, perhaps surprisingly, the bulk of the action – a late-stage seduction scene between Irina and Boris is rendered as a raunchy act of physical comedy that had the audience howling.
Among a cast of more familiar faces, it’s worth shining a light on Mabel Li, who makes her STC debut with this production. Over the course of the play’s four acts, Li’s Nina transforms from wide-eyed ingenue to wounded fawn, and the strength of Li’s performance only becomes apparent when that transformation is complete. For the bulk of the work, Li plays Nina as unnervingly young and innocent, which heightens the predatory nature of Boris’s flirtation with her. When we are reunited with her in the final act, the contrast between the girl we’ve seen before and the woman we’re meeting now is confronting.
We mentioned it’s a comedy, right?
Savage and Upton carefully tease out the humour inherent in Chekhov’s words, even as they change them. Which is to say that while, yes, there are laughs to be had in hearing the 19th-century master’s characters speak in Aussie vernacular or sing along to The Birthday Party’s ‘Mutiny in Heaven’, these changes don’t pervert the intent or undermine the thrust of the work. The comedy is inherent in the characters and the fraught dynamic between them – their tragedy is our comedy.
Production design by David Fleischer keeps the characters trapped in flat planes and harsh angles, but within those claustrophobic boxes there’s a lot of room to move. Maybe there’s nothing new under the sun, but for their final 2023 show STC has found a fresh angle on an old classic.
'The Seagull' plays at Roslyn Packer Theatre until December 16, 2023. Snap up tickets over here.
