The Seagull
Harold Pinter Theatre
 

DIRECTOR Jamie Lloyd is famed for attracting new and diverse audiences to the theatre. And how better to do this than by casting a star of the small screen (Emilia Clarke) in a play written by a theatrical giant (Anton Chekhov), then reworking it for a modern audience through a script by a young, much-celebrated playwright (Anya Reiss)?

If the first night audience of this bold but skeletal West End showpiece is anything to go by – packed as it is with celebrities and eager fans – success is in the bag.

Messing with the work of Chekhov can be perilous, provoking traditionalists to expressions of untold fury. The original Seagull, after all, is adored by the world at large, its greatest productions feasting not only on the profundity of the text and the human truth of the characters, but on the splendour of the rural setting and the originality of the performance style.

In this new version, a whole re-imagined theatrical approach plays fast and loose with the text and substitutes a yellowing, woodchip, boxy set for the usual willowy birch groves and misty lakes.

Actors in casual modern dress line up on rickety chairs – then barely move. We see them fall in and out of performance, drifting off between times into a sedentary meaningless presence before our eyes... human beings who, when they open their mouths, speak only the words defined by their character and by the hope or disappointment that pervades their lives. The rest we imagine.

But what the production loses in naturalism and atmosphere it gains in focus and superb clarity. And what shines out from Chekhov is his in-depth study of the human condition and a simple, fresh look at the uneasy, unwitting crossover between life and performance.  

This is not action confined to the Russian middle classes as we have known it before. This is a universal play about ordinary people such as we may know.

Clarke imbues the young starry-eyed Nina with the beauty and fragility for which she is famed. And Indira Varma brings us a brilliant, revelatory Arkadina, the centre of attention and source of life’s bitter comedy.

Robert Glenister is a perfect, understated Sorin, embodying the Chekhovian melancholy with natural ease, and Jason Barnett is simply hilarious as Shamrayev.

All the characters in this wonderful array are real and recognisable, each locked into their own relentless path and all validating this new, liberated approach from true artists Lloyd and Reiss.

It might have been good  to see this seagull fly eventually. Something about the continuously static state of the actors denies the fluidity of life and its place in a wider nature.

And the echoing, morose tones of Daniel Monks as the broken Konstantin and Tom Rhys Harries as the DiCaprio-type looker Trigorin risk monotony at times.

But Nina speaks the lines as if she were making music, and the whole is crafted like a long and exquisite poem from which the characters etch themselves into our brains. Inspired!

Until September 10 2022. Box office 020 7206 1174, www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-seagull/