Review - The Seagull - Crow’s Theatre, Toronto

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by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Robert Falls, directed by Chris Abraham

Crow’s Theatre with Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

January 15-February 8, 2015

Trigorin: “My life is only raw material”

Chris Abraham’s first project after his superb production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Stratford Festival is an excellent production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull for his own Crow’s Theatre in partnership with Canadian Stage. Strangely the two plays have themes in common. Dream is set in an enchanted forest; Seagull by an “enchanted” lake. Both contain plays within the play. Dream features a string of one-sided love infatuations; so does Seagull. Both plays are comedies that end in tragedy. The tragedy in Dream, Pyramus and Thisbe, is so poorly written and acted it becomes a comedy. The tragedy in Seagull, however, is not a play and is not comic. In either case, both tragedies emphasizes the note of mortality that has run as an undercurrent through the previous scenes of comedy.

The Seagull is generally considered the most difficult of Chekhov’s four major plays to stage. Unlike a play like The Cherry Orchard (1904), where scenes can be simultaneously comic and tragic, in The Seagull (1896), Chekhov veers between the two modes and most directors struggle to keep the two in balance. I have previously seen only one successful Canadian production of the play and that was Neil Munro’s in 1997 for the Shaw Festival with Fiona Reid as Arkadina, Ben Carlson as Konstantin, Jan Alexandra Smith as Nina and Jim Mezon as Trigorin. Both Stratford Festival productions in 1980 and in 2001 were dismal failures. Only very few flaws keep Abraham’s Seagull from reaching the same height as Munro’s.

Like Chekhov’s three other great plays, The Seagull features four acts of Russian aristocrats lounging about in their country house doing next to nothing. There are malign agents of change in the house in Three Sisters (1901) and Uncle Vanya (1898) and a deadline to meet in The Cherry Orchard, but there is neither in The Seagull. Instead, the would-be agent of change is the boy Konstantin himself and his tragicomedy is that his wish for change has no effect at all. Though the tone is generally comic, the play ends with the older generation defeating the younger – the antithesis of traditional comedy. It is, therefore, more difficult to give the play structure and tension than is the case with the other three.

This task, however, Abraham has managed beautifully. Abraham keeps Konstantin’s state of mind in constant focus, noting every blow he suffers until his last shred of hope is pulled away. He has designer Julie Fox place Konstantin’s writing desk in Act 4 in the same spot where his stage had been in

Act 1, where he dared to put on a play he wrote for the assembled house guests. The positional link only underscores how Konstantin’s naive hope had been dashed on the previous occasion.

Abraham also makes the structure underlying the play’s seeming diffuseness admirably clear. We see that the play rests on a quadrangle of relationships with Kontantin’s mother Arkadina (Yanna McIntosh) and her lover Trigorin (Tom Rooney) on one side faced by Konstantin (Philip Riccio) and Nina (Chrsitine Horne), the girl he loves on the other. The square is thus composed of a writer, Trigorin, and a would-be writer, Konstantin; an actress, Arkadina, and a would-be actresss, Nina. The square links two triangles. Konstantin loves and seeks approval from both Arkadina and Nina. Trigorin loves Arkadina out of habit but, tragically, falls in love with Nina, whom he feels has revived his creativity. Those who have ever previously found the play confusing should make a point of seeing Abraham’s production where the structure is so apparent it becomes the engine that drives the action and generates tension.

With only two exceptions, the cast is uniformly excellent and though a mix of Stratford and Toronto actors achieves a solid sense of ensemble so necessary in Chekhov. Philip Riccio’s abilities only seem to increase in strength with every performance. He as been the disregarded youth in Festen in 2008 and The Test in 2011, but here plays the part with several layers of complexity. He loves his mother for what she was but can’t stand her for what she has become. His love for Nina becomes more intense even as he perceives she is drifting away from him. He makes clear in Act 4 that his life has been running on an unfulfilled hope and when that hope is squelched we understand too well that he has nothing left to live for.

Yanna McIntosh wonderfully unites the many paradoxes that make up Arkadina. She has never looked more glamorous and seductive. She makes us admire her beauty while at the same time making clear that it is a sign of her vanity. Unlike some Arkadinas we do believe she loves Konstantin even though his presence is a constant reminder that she is not as young as she wants others to believe. In her piquant scene with Trigorin where she asks him to give up Nina and come away with her, McIntosh excels in displaying Arkadina’s reined powers of manipulation, first cajoling then shaming Trigorin and, when he agrees to do her bidding, pretending that she will do whatever he decides.

Christine Horne is well cast as Nina. She fully conveys Nina’s fragility and naiveté and shows how both qualities inspire love in Konstantin and the strange passion for destruction in Trigorin. The same qualities also make her subject to the man with the stronger will and, that, we see with regret is Trigorin, not Konstantin.

Unlike the others, Tom Rooney does not capture all the complexities of his role. He does not convey a strong enough sense of dissolution. He makes Trigorin’s encomia about the joys of fishing and the simple life so believable that we don’t see how his life with Arkadina completely contradicts them. What Rooney should make plain, but does not, is that Trigorin is a hypocrite, capable both of deceiving himself and others. He stays with Arkadina because she is the stronger and the wealthier of the two. Trigorin should also be a man aware of his own dissolution. When he makes up a story about Nina that ends with a man crushing the life out of an innocent, we should shudder at this revelation of his character. With Rooney, nothing happens.

The secondary characters outside this quadrangle of relationships are generally strong. The parallel to Konstantin’s hopeless love for Nina is the hopeless love of the teacher Medvedenko (Gregory Prest) for Masha (Bahia Watson). The irony here is that Masha is enamoured with Konstanin just as Nina is with Trigorin. Prest has never shown his gift for comedy as well as he does here making the ardent Medvedenko both a nerd and a klutz and painfully aware that that is how others, including Masha, see him. Masha has the most famous line in the play that she always wears black because she is mourning for her life. Yet, Watson hardly shows a woman in mourning as much as a woman nihilistically out of

. This is certainly a different interpretation of the role, but Watson’s overemphatic delivery and gestures tend to separate her from the sense of ensemble the others so well create.

Eric Peterson is loveable as the aged Sorin, Arkadina’s brother, full of wit about himself and others. As Polina, Tara Nicodemo serves as the steadying influence on her foolish and often too boisterous husband Shamrayev, well played by Tony Nappo. Tom McCamus is perfect as the resident doctor Dorn, a cynical commentator on the ways of the world he all seen before.

Designer Julie Fox has clad the cast in period costumes but placed them in an unusual set. The single set has to represent scene both outdoors and indoors. As a result, Fox has two trees growing out of the floorboards of the house – one on stage and one extreme house left in the audience. (The theatre does not sell the seat immediately behind the tree.) A triangle of seats is on stage right so that we are aware of watching an audience watching the play. As we shift our gaze to stage left we note that the plastered walls are unfinished and consist only of plywood. Lumber is leaning against the upstage left corner and the central upstage middle doorway still has plastic covering about it as if to protect it from paint.

One view is that the set reflects Arkadina’s selfishness and notorious stinginess. She may spend money on the latest fashion for herself but she is not spending enough to finish renovating a country house she only occasionally visits. Another view is that those left in the country (i.e. neither Arkadina nor Trigorin) are condemned to a life of neglect, neglect so extreme that the country house seems to be returning to a state of nature. Fox thus cleverly captures both the comedy and the tragedy inherent in Chekhov’s view of country life.

Even if not everything is as perfect as it could be, this production of Abraham is the finest Ontario has seen in the past 18 years. That is no mean accomplishment for such a difficult play, but then Abraham’s penetrating insight makes the usual difficulties associated with this play simply vanish. This gift is one of the reasons Abraham is one of the most important directors working in Canada today and reason enough for anyone to flock to this Seagull.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.

2015-01-16

The Seagull