Adelaide Festival
Theatre

The Seagull
By Anton Chekhov
Adaptation by Hilary Bell
State Theatre Company.
The State Theatre Company Scenic Workshop,
Adelaide Festival Centre.
Duration 2 hours 20 minutes
February 25. Tickets $ 26 – $ 67
Bookings : BASS 131 246 or adelaidefestival.com.au
Until March 16.

In a letter, written in 1895, to his friend Suvorin, Anton Chekhov described his new play The Seagull : “It’s a comedy with three female and six male roles, four acts, a landscape (view of a lake), lots of talk about literature, little action and 180 pounds of love.”

In one throwaway sentence Chekhov describes what, more than a century later, continue to be the challenges of his remarkable play. How can a play with a suicide in it be called a comedy ? What sort of play has people sitting round talking about the artists they haven’t become ? How can the 180 pounds of love be so miserable for nearly everyone on stage?

State Theatre director Geordie Brookman describes Chekhov as a chameleon and certainly in his work there is a fine line between pleasure and pain – and an even finer one between pain and absurdity. Using Hilary Bell’s crisp new adaptation , Brookman has done much to give this engaging production a directness and accessibility that recent Chekhov productions (such as Simon Stone’s The Cherry Orchard) have keenly sought.

Staged in the company’s Scenic Workshop, the audience is seated in two banks of opposing seats, looking down on Geoff Cobham’s parquet wooden catwalk lit by thirty suspended bell-like lampshades. The production has a likeable informality. There is a briskness and playfulness in the presentation – whether in the musical links by Matthew Gregan on ukulele, or the extended business installing deckchairs in the opening scene.

But the strong performances also capture the shifting, often seismic moods of this mercurial play. Xavier Samuel is excellent as Konstantin, anxious, petulant, often close to tears, his scenes with the unworldly Nina (Lucy Fry) pitiful even in their folly.

This is true of all the wretched, unrequited lovers. Polina, the manager’s wife, Medvedenko, the schoolteacher, and the young, free-spirited but defeated, Masha are memorably played by Lizzy Falkland, Matthew Gregan and, in her stomping boots, the outstanding Matilda Bailey. The overbearing celebrity couple Arkadina and Trigorin , (Rosalba Clemente and Renato Musolino) deprived of some of their glamour, are instead deftly highlighted in their desperate status anxiety.

As Dr Dorn, Chekhov’s proxy, Terence Crawford is sardonically pragmatic but compassionate, as evident in his scene with Masha, and Paul Blackwell is warmly avuncular as Soren, especially in his tender connection to Konstantin. Not even Shamrayev (Chris Pitman, in a deadpan comic turn) trying to run an estate not a soiree, is exempt from the turbulence. As the Adelaide Festival begins, Geordie Brookman, the State Theatre Company and the ever-intriguing Anton Chekhov have already given us a highlight.

Murray Bramwell

Published in slightly amended form as “Over a century later Chekhov still delights”, The Australian, February 27, 2014, p.12.