Z/K/M/ Present: The Seagull

Those expecting the drawing room of Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin and its late Tsarist pomp in Z/K/M's production of Chekhov's Seagull would have found themselves confused. Instead they faced technicians chatting in the tech box about football and an actress writhing upon the chaise-longue. This is the Russian dramatist, but not as we would normally know him. 

 

The action centres around a gathering at a country retreat to see playwright Kostya's latest work, performed by young actress Nina. Among the guests are Irina, Kostya's lauded actor mother, and her lover, the great writer Treplyov. After the performance, which Kostya sees as disaster, the eponymous seagull is shot and in the aftermath tries to take his own life - only to be saved by the stage manager and a tannoy announcement. With the sexual intrigues and unrequited loves of the characters revealing themselves in the last act of the performance we see a group of people who become more and more desperately unhappy as they cannot get what they want. When the visitors leave for their train back to Moscow, it is a relief that in leaving the lake house they may find some respite from these hurts. 

 

It is Masha who is the heart of the production. Her performance by Katarina Bistrović Darvaš is a wonderful blend of physical anguish, unspoken longing and jealousy. Her rejection of the boorish Medvedenko, her pining for Kostya and her ultimate acceptance become the narrative through line that we latch onto. Other performers are equally as good. Nataša Dorčić as Polina quickly became a favourite with her cleaning, fussing and insistence on feeding up the other characters, all played with Mrs Doyle-esque ferocity. Her nagging of Dorn (Goran Bogdan) also created some brilliantly funny moments.

 

It is a funny production with laughs at Kostya's anger at his audience and Masha's discontent and need for escape. There were some wonderful stage images that were as funny as they were bleak, like Kostya's re-emergence wrapped in bandages after his first suicide attempt. He cuts a forlorn figure but there's a Pierrot quality in his melancholy and frustrations.

 

Though performed in Serbo-Croat with surtitles, it was easy to follow save for the machine gun quick delivery of huge speeches. This decision of charging through the text communicated the misery of the characters and their uncertainty far more cleverly than a nuanced declamation. This was a production where what was felt from the rhythms, long silences and blasts of heavy metal were as important as the words projected above the actors. 

 

The cleverness of this Seagull is it's constant inversion of who is performing, who is watching and who is preparing for performance. In opening the performance with the abstracted preparation for Kostya's play, being as much the preparation for the actual performance of The Seagull. These roles of performer and spectator blur throughout, notably when three young male audience members are invited on-stage to reset the scene for act three, although acts two and four are entirely cut, and when Trigorin interrogates the audience over their middle-class aversions to travelling on public transport. 

 

Bobo Jelčić's version has real healthy irreverence for the text, which conversely comes to feel like a true respect and caring for the themes and ideas at play in the script. I was reminded of Heiner Muller's comments on his forebear at the Berliner Ensemble, 'to use Brecht without criticising him is to betray him', and for Z/K/M this is their relationship with Chekhov. This is a witty take on a classic. Yes - some of the decisions are bonkers but that adds to the charm of the telling. It felt totally fresh and totally European - where the playwright's apparently sacrosanct text can be treated with a greater disregard. This was director's theatre but a thoroughly engaging spectacle that reenergised a classic in a wholly appropriate way for a modern audience. As the pompous and idealistic Vershinin claims in Three Sisters: 'In two or three hundred years life on Earth will be beautiful, unbearably glorious. Our ancestors will bask in such a glorious life.' Halfway through this transformation we are still as unfulfilled as Masha and Kostya and Z/K/M showed us Chekhov for the contemporary writer he really is. 

The Seagull was at Nottingham Playhouse as part of NEAT14 on Saturday 24 May 2014.

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