The Seagull

Image by Gary Marsh Photography.

Despite the indisputably luminous presence of the veteran Perth-raised star Greta Scacchi in the leading role of traditional theatre diva Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina, and despite the frisson of excitement in seeing Scacchi’s own daughter Leila George (22) playing newbie actress Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaya on the same stage in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896), this production by the Black Swan State Theatre Company of Western Australia was as dead in the water as the shot seagull presented to Nina by her suitor, playwright Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplyov.

Tellingly, there was the requisite applause to close the opening night, but no curtain calls.

While Chekhov himself used his play to discuss, among other things, an inter-generational tussle between the traditional and the more contemporary art forms in the Russia of his day, this production seemed to attempt the integration of contemporary forms into the traditional Chekhov original, producing only discomfort and disorientation. It felt as if this production did not know where it was going.

Staged with a simple conventional lake-scaped and lace-curtained set and costumed in period dress, it looked traditional.

But it all depends on whether you like your Chekhov not just in a deliberately pronounced Aussie accent, but also adorned with phrases such as ‘adolescent wankery’ (to describe Konstantin’s then ‘new-age’ theatre) and ‘You’re all crap!’ (Konstantin’s sally against the establishment).

The script was played for laughs, which it successfully elicited from a supportive audience, but too rarely for real theatre or drama. The result was repeated bathos.

The pacing of the production also seemed to mirror too faithfully the ‘rustic tedium’ referred to by Scacchi’s character Arkadina, pining for more urban delights while holidaying at the lakeside country estate belonging to her brother Pjotr Nikolayevich Sorin (nicely played by Michael Loney, in contrast to other male roles in this production).

The whole thing looked somewhat ‘2D’, relying mostly on mere delivery of lines. George was occasionally engaging, but when it came to the expected passion between her character Nina and Arkadina’s lover, writer Boris Alexeyevich Trigorin, the electricity was absent.

The problem seemed to lie chiefly in the adaptation and the direction of the play. It seems unlikely that Scacchi herself could have been wholly comfortable with these. In a recent interview with William Yeoman for the West Weekend magazine in The Weekend West newspaper (July 12–13, 2014) she revealed herself to be a bit of a traditionalist, ‘from the British theatre tradition’, saying of contemporary culture, ‘There’s that lack of ceremony and grace and form…I can see that some of it’s radical, that it’s breaking new ground. But it seems chaotic and nihilistic in a way that I think is a bit sad.’ She could almost have been speaking of this production.

On the other hand, it was a nice irony perhaps, to cast Scacchi as Arkadina the traditionalist, with her daughter George as the new-generation actress Nina, when George herself in real life has chosen a different path from her mother’s, training in American ‘Method’ acting at the Lee Strasbourg Theatre and Film Institute in New York. The Australian-born George by the way, is Scacchi’s daughter by the tempestuous American actor Vincent D’Onofrio (of TV’s Law and Order series).

Black Swan has a deservedly fine reputation in Perth, established since its inception in 1991. Occasional missteps are perhaps inevitable, and there will surely be more to celebrate in future. In another nice irony, even Chekhov himself had to endure and survive a disastrously unsuccessful first staging of The Seagull in 1896, with the play eventually emerging as a triumph, particularly in 1898 under the inspired direction of Constantin Stanislavski. All is not lost on opening nights.