John Baker on The Seagull

John Baker is a Yorkshire-based writer, author of a long list of crime and fiction novels, the most recent of which is Winged With Death. In a recent trip to London, John stopped by the National Theatre Lyttleton to see Katie Mitchell’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull – in a new translation by Martin Crimp. He kindly agreed to offer his thoughts on the experience here.

As a long-time admirer of Chekhov’s work, both the plays and the short stories, I never regretted that he didn’t do more with the novel. To revolutionize two literary forms is surely enough for the reputation of one man. And anyway, as is the case with these things, he did influence the course of the novel, though his own efforts in that direction didn’t amount to much.

Of Konstantin and Hamlet, Ben Whishaw observes: “They’re both sort of hypersensitive, depressed mummy’s boys.”

Perhaps Chekhov was like that, too? We don’t really know. But we do know that many of the characters and events in his plays are taken directly from his own experience. There was a cherry orchard that was chopped down. There was an intense and hypersensitive young experimental playwright. And he did have to kill a bird that was badly injured.

Following the complete failure of The Seagull in St Petersburg in 1896, Chekhov vowed never to write for the stage again. He was raving. “The actors don’t know their parts. They understand nothing. The acting is horrible. The play will flop.” He felt that trying to write for the theatre was like “eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach had just been removed.”

And he wasn’t alone in his assessment of the play. A St Petersburg review commented: “(This is) . . . a boring, drawn-out thing that embitters the listener. It isn’t a play. There is nothing theatrical in it. The auditorium expected something great and got a bad, boring piece. Chekhov is not a playwright. The sooner he forgets the stage, the better.”

Chekhov’s relationship to the stage was ambiguous after this experience. In his letters he refers to it often as “an evil disease of the towns” and “the gallows on which dramatists are hanged.”

But the piece was revived by the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1898 and, directed by Stanislavsky, established Chekhov as a master of his craft. The process was started by a letter from Nemirovich-Danchenko, who wrote “The Seagull enthralls me and I will stake anything you like that these hidden dramas and tragedies in every character of the play, given a skillful production without banalities, can enthrall the auditorium, too. Our theatre is beginning to arouse the strong indignation of the Imperial theatres. They understand we are making war on routine, cliches, recognized geniuses, and so on . . .”

Juliet Stevenson has said, ‘It’s good to do things that you are scared of.’ In the symbolism of Chekhov’s play the seagull comes to represent lost dreams. And in this version the translator, Martin Crimp, and the director, Katie Mitchell, have combined to cut down the text and reposition parts of the play in an attempt to offer something more and something new to a modern audience.

This, of course, within the spirit of the play . . . as Konstantin, one of the characters, insists: We need new forms. New forms are needed, and if we can’t have them, then we had better have nothing at all.

The Seagull centres on the conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ingenue Nina, the fading leading lady Irina Arkadina (Stevenson), her son the experimental playwright Konstantin Treplyov (Whishaw), and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin. Chekhov drew freely on the text and theme of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and it has been suggested that The Seagull is not unlike a mirror image of Hamlet.

I enjoyed this version of the play enormously while it was happening in front of me and, still, in retrospect, I think it was a fine play, well-handled by all the cast. Mitchell and Crimp took enormous liberties with the text, and although I’m uneasy with the idea of doing that, nevertheless, in this instance I thought it worked to everyone’s advantage, including Chekhov’s (though he may not agree, were he still around).

I thought the ploy of bringing the play-within-a-play forward to the opening act, and the device of showing it to us from ‘behind’ the actors worked well.

I missed the written-out part of the school-teacher’s marriage, but not a lot.

And in the last act I thought the lighting was too dim. I wanted to see the actors facial expressions, and though I was sitting quite near to the stage, I couldn’t make them out.

Although the play worked for me I do hope we don’t get a rash of ‘rewritten’ classics in the wake of it. It certainly won’t work every time.