Tag Archives: theatre

Attempted review of a most excellent Chekhov’s The Seagull

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A new production of Chekhov’s play The Seagull has-

{So why is it called The Seagull?}
{Excuse me! Who are you?! And what are you doing in my theater review?}
{Just trying to help you get to the point. I hate those wordy, loud-mouthed reviewers.}
{I hadn’t even started yet!}
{And already prevaricating and going on about yourself…}
{Hrrumph. Apparently there are seagulls on the lakes in Russia,-}
{Ooooh, who knew?}
{-where the play is set , and Nina is compared to a seagull by Constantin and Tragorin, and the play ends with a stuffed seagull being placed on stage. Now may I begin?}
{You may. Start with the characters; Chekhov’s people always remind me of my neighbors.}

Irina Arkadina, a famous but aging actress, brings her lover, the successful writer Trigorin, to the country estate where her retired brother and her son live. Her son, Constantin, wants to be writer, and has a tempestuous relationship with his difficult, attention-seeking mother. Constantin loves the naive Nina, who wants to be a famous actress. The rest of the characters circle around the story of these four in this family comic-tragedy. Let’s just say things begin to unwind in a downward spiral when Nina runs off to Moscow and becomes Trigorin’s lover rather than an actress, and this light family comedy takes on tragic tones that have to be avoided in drawing room conversation.

{Little social-climbling slut!}
{Not really, more naive than anything. Now if you’ll please keep quiet!}

The Seagull is the first of Chekhov’s 4 major plays prior to his death from tuberculosis in 1904. When it was first staged in 1896, the audience booed so loudly that the actress playing Nina lost her voice from fear. It had the typical Chekhovian cast of fully-developed, ordinary characters who keep most of the action offstage, and interact trivially while talking around more serious matters. For instance, a certain writer blows his brains out offstage and we hear no formal discussion, just a whisper to get Irina away. Subtext of this type was an innovation, and helped bring theatrical convention away from melodrama and into the realms of realism.

The version being played at the Walter Kerr theater in New York city, through December 21st, was written by Christopher Hampton, who says “Chekhov used to be thought of as a lyrical, melancholy kind of writer, and he isn’t. He’s a very muscular, energetic, clear, lucid writer” in this interview with NPR. The strength of the dialogue really comes out in the exchanges, often heated, between Irina (Kristin Scott Thomas of Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient fame) and Constantin (Mackenzie Crook, who is in the BBC version of The Office). Their relationship mirrors that of Hamlet and his mother, as Constantin hates his mother’s lover and vies for her respect and attention. This production actually took 9 of the original cast from the British Royal Court’s production, although Kristin Scott Thomas was a new and welcome addition.

{Yes, yes, that is all very well, but how was it? what did you think of the performance?}
{Oh, you mean this performance? the Ian Rickson production that I just saw?}
{Oh, go on then. That one, yes of course!}

I really enjoyed it.

{That’s it??? You got to say more than that.}

This highly-enjoyable production held my attention from the moment it subtly started, with a character walking out before the lights went down and the audience hushing itself. The different love-longings and sadness and disappointments of the characters was interspersed with laughter throughout, and kept this tragedy in content light in context. It was perfectly staged, with great sound and lighting. The actors were on the top of their game. Kristin Scott Thomas might have been over that top, but then the character Irina is meant to be over the top to some degree and it worked within the play. I really felt drawn into a different world, and was genuinely troubled by the appearance of Nina in the last act.

I think it was an excellent production of an excellent play. A perfect play, really, as it felt like a perfectly harmonious whole and the end was satisfying even while tragic. The characters were true to life throughout, and distinctive as people you live next to and see every day. I thought it was moving in the way life often is, with significance understood rather than outspoken. The New York Times also praised the production, in case you’re interested. It was beautiful to watch, especially as things went from light to dark in the end.

{Well, I’ll go see it then.}
{Please do, and go away…bothersome old thing!}
{What was that last bit?}
{Nothing!}

Stoppard’s Rock and Roll and Every Good Boy Deserves Favor

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Recently, I had the lucky chance to go see an early work of Stoppard’s, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, playing for one night in New York city in a combined effort from Boston University’s theatre and orchestra department. An unusual play, Stoppard created it in 1977 at the request of a friend and composer André Previn. Because it requires a full orchestra, it is rarely staged.

It tells the story of Alexander, put into a lunatic asylum in Soviet Russia for critiquing the Soviet Union, and Alexander, his truly insane cellmate who happens to have the same name. Alexander the lunatic “has an orchestra,” which is what he conducts throughout the political drama to mirror the rising and falling tensions. The orchestra, in this instance situated on the stage, follows his commands. He even interacts with his imaginary players, walking between them and yelling at individuals. Stoppard plays up the comedic aspect of the asylum, the hypocritical political system, and the unexpected dénouement fully. Also, a hint of the bizarre, akin to the huge cat in tails in Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia, appears at the end, in the form of a Magistrate on stilts who towers over the two Alexanders during their questioning. This short play did not lack for clever moments, plays and counterplays of action especially, but the dialogue was sparser that Stoppard’s fully developed style, the settings, characters, action all simpler, and the political critique decidedly pronounced.

The use of music begs comparison with Stoppard’s show currently on Broadway, Rock and Roll. I failed to comment on Stoppard’s use of music in a previous post on this play. Rock and Roll’s blasting interludes and Every Good Boy’s full orchestral score are both atmospheric and also closely related to distinct actions or individuals feelings. Rock and Roll neatly divides the play when moments reach an emotional crescendo. Additionaly, the type of music very effectively grounds the audience in a specific time, place and intellectual outlook. Forget that you never heard of The Plastic People of the Universe (a Czech rock band that acquired political overtones when they were repressed) because taken together with the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd you come to understand it signifies youth and change and rebellion. This underground Czech group are held up as an ideal of resistance to Communism by one character. The PPU and all other music in Rock and Roll contrast with the music of Every Good Boy not merely because one is rock and the other classical.

In Rock and Roll, Stoppard appropriates real music from the era he portrays, and in doing so lends veracity as well as nostalgia to his take on the aftermath of the Prague Spring. On the other, a score is invented to keep up with a playwright and a madman’s imaginination, rendering a unreal atmosphere to a charged political drama. The topsy-turvy music and the politics of the insane asylum in general highlight and critique Soviet government as illogical and absurd system.

Rock and Roll’s music, with all the veracity of authenticity and its loud volume, remains comfortably distant and in the past. Not only does Every Good Boy’s music not feel dated, it feels quite immediate and relevant. An interestingly unexpected effect, as Every Good Boy is further in the past and also has the effect of unreality. In different and surprising ways, Stoppard use music to great significance in both works. To return to a theme in such a different way is striking: Rock and Roll as the more mature treatment of themes of Every Good Boy deserves favor with their similar critique of Soviet suppression and emotional depth as well as the interaction of the individual with the state and with the media.