It's about love: STCSA's The Seagull

It was about ideas. Big ideas.
What every play should be about.

 – Dorn

In a letter to a friend in 1895, Chekhov famously 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; at the same time, however, in true Chekhovian fashion, it’s not particularly ‘about’ any one thing, except perhaps Life.

The play was, of course, The Seagull, and like the best works of literature, it transcends the centuries and is still as fresh and bold and groundbreaking as the day it was first performed. And, like the classics, every so often a production comes along that cuts to the very heart of what it is about that you cannot help but be struck by its beauty, elegance and rawness. For me, that production was the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s The Seagull, presented as part of the Adelaide Festival.

In the hood: Windmill's Fugitive

I grew up with the Robin Hood story (frankly, which kid didn’t?). I love its big epic tale of heroics and bravery, courage, action, romance and the ending which is only really the beginning. And it’s not hard to see why it’s such a good story, why it has lasted so long. It’s one of those stories which is both extremely simple and complex at the same time, a kind of two-way mirror or a kind of kaleidoscope that twists and magnifies the more you look at it. It’s about brigands and outlaws fighting injustice; it’s about social injustice and looking after the people who’ve fallen through the cracks in society for one reason or another; it’s about fighting for the underdog and standing up to those in charge, asking people ‘will you tolerate this?’ Yet, it’s a Romance, in the tradition of the quest stories from antiquity, the same essential story as that of King Arthur, another greatly mythologised figure.

Matthew Whittet’s Fugitive, playing at the Adelaide Festival as part of Windmill Theatre’s trilogy of rites-of-passage stories, is a comic-book fantasy hip-hop romp through a near-future dystopia. “The leaders have disappeared,” we are told. “It’s every man for himself. In the fog of his urban chaos, a young man returns. A guy with strange power and a backpack of destruction.” His name, like that of his legendary counterpart, is Robin. And he’s here to help.