Theatre
The Seagull (Donmar Warehouse) An Ideal Husband (Theatre Royal, Haymarket)
Choosing Chekhov
Sheridan Morley
More than one Seagull is flying around London this late summer: like King Lear a year or three ago, it seems to have become suddenly hot, whether at the Old Vic in the enchanting Peter Hall/Felicity Kendal version or now, at the Warehouse in a more radical if less ravishing staging by English Touring Theatre. This inevitably is a bare-bones production (in a new transla- tion by Stephen Mulrane) and has been on the road since early May, but the Ware- house is perfectly suited to such minimal- ism, and the director Stephen Unwin has found all kinds of virtues in necessity.
Like Coward's The Vortex, Chekhov's classic is a Hamlet variant oddly unwilling to acknowledge its source; but until we understand that both these dramas of country-house owners in decline (they were after all written less than 30 years apart, at times of massive social and moral change in both Russia and Britain) are essentially extensions of the Hamlet/Gertrude closet scene, we are never fully going to appreci- ate what is going on between mother and son, and although it has always been possi- ble to find other things at stake in both scripts, the question of at least intellectual incest should never be this far from the sur- face.
Here we get Cheryl Campbell as an unusually bitchy, outlandish Arkadina, an actress forever about to send in the clowns but whose career seems to have been little more successful than that of the doomed Nina; equally, Duncan Bell's Trigorin is now a self-hating, defeated novelist instead of the starry Moscow writer more usually discovered in the character. As a result, there is not a lot of difference between him and Arkadina on the one hand, and Kon- stantin and Nina on the other; the older couple may have escaped the stifling bore- dom and lethargy of her country estate, but the bright lights and the big city have apparently brought them no greater satis- faction and only marginally better incomes. Thus, at least one of the central conflicts here, that about commercial success as against artistic failure, is denied us and we are left with a group of depressives essen- tially trying to work out whether they would rather be depressed in the country or the town. Forced to play with the aid of a crutch, Mark Bazeley makes of Kon- stantin a suitably angry young man, per- haps rather too close to Jimmy Porter for period comfort, but one for whom it is impossible to feel much sorrow at the final suicide; the only real question here is why he didn't do it sooner.
As for Nina, Joanna Roth comes up with a starry young drama student whose career, again, seems to have fallen apart in much the way one might have predicted from her self-consciously terrible performance at the outset in Konstantin's horrendous little verse drama. The idea that some great tal- ents have gone missing here is itself miss- ing throughout, and I found myself more often than usually reminded of my two favourite critical responses to the play: a 1929 London critic who merely wrote `Lenin was right to kill them all' and a Broadway reviewer who felt, two decades later, that all of Konstantin's problems could have been solved by an athletics scholarship to a decent university.
To the Theatre Royal, Haymarket we welcome back yet again Peter Hall's revival of An Ideal Husband; the production, now four years old, which has already tri- umphed all over the West End and on Broadway but still manages to retain from the original cast Martin Shaw as an Oscar- looking Lord Goring and Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray as the cynical elders. We are now of course into Wilde times; with the centenary of his death only a couple of years away we have the imminent opening of the Stephen Fry movie and a raft of new biographies, all of which serve to highlight Hall's early realisation that even by Oscar's standards of creative egocentricity this was the most autobiographical of his plays, with Dashed funny that. Probation officer turning out to be your old nanny.' sexual, social and political scandals crash- ing into each other as a very similar era of centennial angst overtook a weary London aching for change but oddly unable to find the energy with which to see it through.
Some of the new casting is considerably less powerful than the original, and it is clear that Hall himself has been too pre occupied with the survival of his troubled Old Vic company to pull the newcomers into first-class form; all the same, thanks to the master-class in octogenarian survival offered by the Denisons (he was in the film of The Importance half a century ago and has lost none of his Wilde panache, while historians might like to consider the amaz- ing truth that Oscar had been dead less than 15 years when they were born), and Martin Shaw's increasingly charismatic chats to the audience while still in full char- acter, this Husband is still about as close to ideal as it gets. If there were any more proof needed of the importance of keeping the Hall company alive, if not at the Vic then elsewhere, it is at the Haymarket. And maybe that is the theatre they should now make their home?
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