‘Seagull’ Comes Alive, Love Remains Unfulfilled
By ROBERT FELDBERG, STAFF WRITER
REVIEW
THE SEAGULL
Broadway play revival, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St.
Written by Anton Chekhov; adapted by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Ian Rickson.
With Kristin Scott Thomas, Peter Sarsgaard, Mackenzie Crook and Carey Mulligan.
Schedule: 8 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: $41 to $135.
Telecharge: 212-239-6200 or telecharge.com.
“The Seagull” arrived from London festooned with top-shelf adjectives: “rapturous,”"exhilarating,”"finest.”
And the revival of Chekhov’s play, which opened Thursday night at the Walter Kerr Theatre, is deserving of all of them – most of the time.
What’s missing in the transfer can be deduced from checking the Playbill. (More on that later.) The flaws are disappointing, but far from fatal, in an often terrific theatrical experience.
“The Seagull,” Chekhov’s first major play — and a favorite among theater people because it’s about theater people — is frequently revived.
I’ve never seen another production, though, that was so immediate and alive, so rich in its exploration of the characters.
Chekhov’s reputation hardly needs rescuing, but this effort knocks off the stylization encrusted in a century of revivals to reveal the playwright’s essential dramatic power.
In Christopher Hampton’s new translation, the language is strikingly direct, allowing director Ian Rickson and most of the actors to connect to the core of the characters and their relationships.
On one level, “The Seagull” is a sad comedy of unfulfilled love. Everyone wants someone who’s unattainable.
Beginning at the bottom of the social ladder, the hapless schoolteacher Medvedenko (Pearce Quigley) loves Masha (Zoe Kazan), the daughter of the estate manager. She pines for Konstantin (Mackenzie Crook), an aspiring playwright and the nephew of the estate’s owner. Konstantin adores Nina (Carey Mulligan), his neighbor and a would-be actress.
Nina is smitten with the successful middlebrow writer Trigorin (Peter Sarsgaard), who’s the lover of the celebrated but aging actress Arkadina (Kristin Scott Thomas), Konstantin’s mother.
Within this potentially farcical situation, Rickson and the cast find the complexity, the tragedy of unreturned love and its companion, unrealized ambition.
Crook gives an intense but shaded performance in which Konstantin is not – as he’s often played – a meagerly talented, petulant young man whose quest for new forms of theater is a joke.
His Konstantin is onto something artistically, even if his skill is not fully formed. That makes his inability to break through much more affecting, while deepening the impact of his rejections by Nina and his vain, clueless mother.
Mulligan, a luminous young actress, is heartbreaking as Trigorin’s naive victim, seduced and abandoned, and left to tour the provinces as a third-rate actress.
The production’s best scene is her last visit to the estate, worn and tired, but still rejecting Konstantin. We slowly realize that, beneath the pitiable exterior, she has an iron resolve: She will continue acting; her ambition will never fade.
Meanwhile, we also understand that Konstantin is undone not just by the loss of Nina, but by having to work as a hack writer to support himself.
Thomas gives a glittering, beautifully detailed performance as Arkadina, giving her glamour and enormous charm but also revealing a woman who’s vain, selfish and cold-hearted.
It’s the kind of outsized personality that’s amusing from a distance, but considerably less appealing to a son seeking love and approval.
Also contributing strongly, in supporting roles, are Peter Wight as Arkadina’s older brother Sorin, the owner of the estate and a man filled with regret over paths not taken; Art Malik as Dorn, the insightful and sympathetic doctor; and Quigley, as the humble, tramped-on teacher.
What all these actors have in common, a look at the program reveals, is that they worked together in the London production.
The main newcomers to the cast are Sarsgaard and Kazan, and they stick out like sore thumbs. Their styles are often out of sync with their fellow performers’, with Sarsgaard doing too little and Kazan too much.
Although he gives a sense of the irony of the mediocre Trigorin’s devotion to writing, Sarsgaard’s performance is bland and muted. Trigorin never emerges as a significant, know-able figure.
As the forlorn Masha, a dedicated depressive – her first line is “I’m in mourning for my life” – Kazan performs an outrageously over- the-top scene, getting cheap laughs by striding around the stage and ostentatiously puffing on a cigarette, a la Bette Davis.
“The Seagull” is not, unfortunately, a seamlessly special experience. Most of it, though, from conception to execution, is inspired.
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E-mail: feldberg@northjersey.com
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(c) 2008 Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.