Two years ago, I
saw Benedict Andrews’ production of The
Seagull at Belvoir Street Theatre, and fell in love with the play, with the
aching emptiness and fragility that seemed to run underneath its neurotic
chaotic surface. While I ultimately didn’t like the production on quite a
profound level, I think Andrews was getting at something he couldn’t quite
articulate effectively enough. And it got me thinking about it, about Chekhov’s
play, about the production; about why these sorts of plays last, why they are
called ‘classics.’ Before I go any further, I want to make a distinction clear:
in theatre, there is a difference between the play and the production. While
the two are often used interchangeably, the play more pedantically refers to
the script, while the production connotes the specific envisioning of the
script by the director, designers, actors and technicians.
In a letter to a
friend in 1895, Chekhov described the play he was working on as “a comedy –
three f., six m., four acts, a landscape (a view of a lake), much conversation
about literature, little action, and five tons of love.” While it is a rather
simplistic reduction of the play, it is nonetheless quite a succinct summary.
If you were to examine the play, peel back its layers and try to get inside
each of Chekhov’s characters, you’d find that ultimately it’s a play about love
in all its different guises; yet, at the same time, in true Chekhovian fashion,
it’s not particularly ‘about’ anything, except perhaps Life.
In Chekhov’s plays, as he himself says,
there is “little action.” Stella Adler, the actor and teacher, furthers this by
discussing how the action that happens on-stage in Chekhov’s plays “is what is not happening. It happened before the
characters came in. What matters is not the circumstances but the character’s
reaction[s] to the circumstances.” A relatively simple observation like this
explains why Chekhov’s plays are largely meditative, rhapsodies on a theme if
you will; even though time passes and people leave and come and go and return,
there is still a feeling of stasis, a sense of entrapment and immovability
against the advance of radical socio-political change. Chekhov’s plays too, are
marked by a distinct sense of futility and disillusionment; the characters
exist in a seemingly perpetual state of despair, as can be seen throughout The Seagull.
Chekhov’s plays are inhabited not with
characters but with people. “Chekhov creates them and the play in such a way
that it makes it possible for you not to follow so much the plot as the people
themselves,” Adler says. “Their actions are human. People live life, not a play.” In these time-frozen
snapshots of worlds that Chekhov presents, the characters exist in isolated
cul-de-sacs of reality, on the outskirts of towns and cities, on estates that
seem to be touched and yet untouched by time’s passage. His people – characters
– are “disregards,” those left behind by the changes happening around them; the
upper-class and or military-class “left floating…because they are not used to
working,” as the nineteenth century closes and the twentieth century begins. “Nobody
has a cent. That is because of the moment in history… you are not in
Tolstoyland with the upper aristocrats. You are with a kind of society that has
had the best of everything but is now going through something different. The
transition is very hard.” The underlying current throughout Chekhov’s oeuvre,
alongside the despair and fragility, is a sense of pain: “Transition is pain.
In The Cherry Orchard they laugh on
top of the pain. But always in transition there is a bottom line of agony and
pain.” And you can see it in The Seagull,
through Shamraev and Polina, through Masha and Arkadina, the way the estate is
crumbling, worthless; there is no money, yet they carry on as normal. “It’s
about the constant heartbreak of daily life. [Chekhov] understood something
about daily life – the constant disappointment of wasted talent and stifled
ambition, of not achieving what you want to. That to [him] was the heartbreak.”
As often happens in ‘real’ life, “people
[in Chekhov] are heartbroken all day long and [yet] live quite normally. They
live without hope… the everyday tragic fate of life is with them. They walk
around within this situation, accepting it. [They talk] to one another,
revealing themselves, communicating with one another, directly or indirectly.”
In his Director’s Notes for Belvoir’s production of The Seagull, Benedict Andrews builds upon Adler’s comments:
“Chekhov’s characters encounter life as a frozen storm, living in the eye of
the storm, debris swirling around them. They walk, talk, eat, drink, write,
love, and are shipwrecked again and again against the shore of life. They cling
to illusions and hopes which rip them apart… [And Chekhov] opens them up to
their cores and finds them wounded, incandescent. Bursting.” Through suffering and loss, Chekhov’s
characters find the capacity to endure; as Nina says, ‘to go on even when it
feels like you can’t.’ And
it’s out of this heartbreak and disappointment that the beauty of The Seagull comes from.
There’s something else about Chekhov’s work
that is significant, perhaps more so in performance than on the page, and that
is the symbolism. At the beginning of The
Seagull, Masha talks about a storm – “there’s a storm coming,” she says –
but it’s not necessarily a natural storm, a thunderstorm, but an emotional
inter-personal storm that’s rolling ever-closer as they speak. Once you know
this, you start to see the embodiment of the storm, the effect the storm has on
the characters throughout the play, can chart its progress throughout each
scene and act. It’s the tension created by the weather, by the characters, that
is fascinating in Chekhov, the way each reflects the other. And so we come back
to the way that in Chekhov, nothing seems to be happening and yet everything is happening. “Something is always
happening off-stage that feeds the inner action,” Adler says. Even if nothing
seems to be happening, as at the beginning of The Seagull when Masha says “I am in mourning for my life.” “Inner
actions always make a modern play come alive in a sense of quiet poetry, even
when nothing is happening[;] the characters involve you in their inner
actions.”
The story goes that the actor playing Trigorin in
the 1905 revival of The Seagull
in Moscow
It’s interesting to examine
how Chekhov builds his play. At its heart is a quartet – ‘The Seagull Quartet,’
I call it – of Konstantin and Trigorin, Nina and Irina Arkadina. The first two
are writers, the latter actors; two of them are experienced, almost
professionals (Trigorin and Irina), the others are just starting out,
fledglings (Konstantin and Nina). From focusing upon this quartet, the
resonances with Shakespeare’s Hamlet
become more apparent. Both feature a young man who is in love with a girl who
may or may not love him back. The boy’s mother has ‘married’ again and this
displeases him. Both ‘boys’ stage a play to achieve something, and both plays
are interrupted, unfinished. Both of the larger plays derive a large part of
their tension and, paradoxically, action from the inherent inaction of their
characters. Konstantin’s relationship with his mother, the successful actress
Irina Arkadina, mirrors that of Hamlet and Gertrude: like Hamlet, Konstantin
“loves his mother [but] doesn’t want her touched by another man. That is a big
psychological thing.” Shakespeare and Chekhov both knew it, and the
repercussions, for Konstantin, for Arkadina, for Trigorin, for Nina, ripple
throughout the play until ultimately leading to the play’s tragic (and, again, preventable)
end. Like Hamlet, Konstantin chose one way out; the other way, of course, was
Life. The similarities and analogies, on Chekhov’s part, are deliberate; they give
The Seagull an echo, an added
dimension, a place in a larger conversation, which makes it more potent.
*
In Benedict Andrews’ production at Belvoir in
June 2011, Chekhov’s play was located in a south-coast Australian “holiday shack, somewhere, with a view to a lake or coastal estuary.”
He goes on to talk about it being “an Australian dreaming place where life
takes on alternate rhythms. There’s a special lightness. A bleaching light.
Everything dissolves.” In theory, it worked; on paper, it seems fine. But when
you add his effects – his seemingly stock mechanics of stage-craft, like things
falling from the sky, glass boxes, loud discordant music and soundscapes, neon
lights, confronting (and sometimes unnecessary) contemporary embellishments and
indulgences – something gets lost in translation from page to stage. On paper,
it sounds positively Wintonian, like a story Tim Winton would write, though I’m
not so sure that Andrews is right when he says that “[something] chimes between the fragile community
gathered around the spellbinding lake in Chekhov’s play and the question of
being an artist now in Australia .
There’s a similar friction and challenge.” But that’s not to discount or
disparage the play, rather only the production. The cast, too, were seemingly
unbeatable on paper, but again something was lost in translation to the stage.
For a play about the theatre, about art, about writing, and the intersection
where they all meet Life, it was lifeless,
an embodiment of Konstantin and Trigorin’s inability to (accurately) capture the
“flux of life that surrounds them.” Just as in Chekhov,
how two characters “never understand each other on the same plane,” so too did
Andrews perhaps not really get the play. Instead, the production is perhaps best encapsulated by
appropriating the play’s own central metaphor: “one day, a man
comes along and sees an old play lying around on a shelf, and having nothing
better to do, destroys it for a new generation.” Benedict Andrews had,
ultimately, and unintentionally, seagulled The Seagull.
*
“We need new forms,”
Konstantin is often saying. He might as well be speaking as Chekhov, might as
well be talking about The Seagull itself.
Not only was it Chekhov’s first serious full-length play, but it was also his
first serious (successful) experiment with the ‘Chekhovian’ style we now
associate with him; it contains the seeds of elements that can be found in his
three other major plays – Uncle Vanya,
The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. The Seagull then, is ultimately about love, about people, about the
theatre; it is about “the catastrophes you have to survive,” about “personal
life, home life, the intimate joys and sorrows, the good and bad fortunes. They
are a touching, moving group of people. You feel close to them because it is
intimate… His people want to live, really want to go on. They are in a trap,
but in a way they are heroes; if you can live within the trap, something heroic
comes out.” We watch, mesmerised, as the unspoken stories of their lives
overlap, as their lives intertwine and get messy, as characters suffer and
celebrate, as they cry and laugh and dance and weep and fight and tear each
other to pieces; as the minutiae of their lives is peeled back with “scalpel
precision.” And perhaps, once all is said and done, once the play is long over
and Nina has made a name for herself as an actress, perhaps she “might herself
write the story of those lives around the lake,” might write the story of a
young girl who lives by a lake, who loves the lake, and a man who turns up one
day, sees her, and mindlessly destroys her…
Fn. March, 2014: For an in-depth review of a spellbinding production of Chekhov's masterpiece, see my piece on State Theatre Company of South Australia's The Seagull, as part of the 2014 Adelaide Festival.
REFERENCES
Stella
Adler. Stella Adler on Ibsen,
Strindberg, and Chekhov. Edited by Barry Paris. Alfred A. Knopf: New York
Benedict Andrews.
Adaptor and Director’s Notes, in The
Seagull. By Anton Chekhov, in a new version by Benedict Andrews. Currency
Press: 
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