It starts with a fed-up girl in a goth black dress, cigarettes stashed in her bra, perched on an outdoor stage surrounded by Marshall amps, as a young man takes a piss in the long, yellow-dry grass. “What’s with all the black?” he asks her as he finishes up. “I’m in mourning for my life,” she replies, squaring up to the barrel of a rifle mounted on the makeshift stage.
This is Masha (Megan Wilding) and her hapless but hopeful would-be lover Simon (Arka Das). He’s poor, she’s depressed, and they’re just two in an extended cast of family, neighbours, lovers and friends who’ve converged on the rural property of ageing hippie Peter (Sean O’Shea) and his famous stage-actor sister, Irina (Sigrid Thornton).
As dusk and summer’s mosquitoes descend, they’re corralled by Irina’s precocious, uni drop-out son Constantine (Harry Greenwood) for an al fresco performance of his experimental “play”: a theatrical sound installation starring his girlfriend Nina (Mabel Li) as the “voice of the universe”.
Andrew Upton was never going to do a corseted adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The former artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company has charted a course through the Russian playwright’s works that started with period-appropriate adaptations of The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya before loosening the stays with a punk take on Platonov (2015’s The Present, starring his wife and former fellow STC artistic director Cate Blanchett) and a poignant, utterly contemporary Three Sisters (2017).
His take on The Seagull, Chekhov’s third full-length play and first stab at his much-vaunted slice-of-life realism, takes us to Australia in the early 2000s (as evidenced by an Apple “Clamshell” iBook), where the parents’ generation listen to the St Kilda post-punk of their 1980s heyday (The Birthday Party’s Mutiny in Heaven makes an early appearance). If Constantine were living in Melbourne, he’d probably be a member of the anarchic, “anti-theatre” collective Black Lung (the real-life training ground of actors including Mark Leonard Winter and Gareth Davies). Instead he’s stuck out in woop-woop with his fuzzy, bumbling uncle, searching for an artistic revolution that’s just beyond his grasp.
The Seagull is partly about being an artist and what it takes; what it does to you. It’s also about far more prosaic stuff: the tedious work of simply enduring the slings and arrows of time. Most of the characters love the wrong person and want what they can’t have, warding off the ignominies and disappointments of the present with nostalgia for the past and dreams of the future – or booze. (Tellingly, the ones who aim for the least seem to come off best.) As Chekhov himself said of his play, there’s lots of talking and little action; the “big moments” are all clearly foreshadowed (theatre nerds will note the literal Chekhov’s gun on stage at the outset) and happen off stage, and we’re left watching people react.
The director, Imara Savage (last in charge of the Roslyn Packer theatre stage for 2018’s Saint Joan, starring Sarah Snook), and the designer, David Fleischer, deliver a series of evocative dioramas (one for each of the four acts) that take us from the high-summer rural Australian landscape into the claustrophobic, mission-brown interior of the family home, in midwinter.
Within these settings, the ensemble of actors fizz and pop in endless chemical reactions – some more satisfying than others.
Thornton doesn’t have as much fun as she could with this classic “big diva” role (which should rightfully generate some of the play’s biggest laughs); Greenwood leans a little too hard into the petulance of Constantine, whose histrionics risk becoming too tiresome as the play wears on.
Wilding is well cast as Masha, stomping around and rolling her eyes to great comic effect, but also finding the character’s real pain and despair. Sean O’Shea, consistently excellent in comic roles, is perfection as the neurotic, sensitive uncle Peter (and delivers a pièce de résistance monologue involving diabolical goats). Toby Schmitz is note-perfect as Irina’s novelist boyfriend, Boris – a grimly familiar Ozlit fuckboy and darling of the writers festival circuit.
Nina, in this production, emerges as the focal point. As originally written, this character’s journey is in many ways unsatisfying: a naive young woman who falls for the ruthless Boris and runs away to join the “theatre” circus, seeking fame as an actor – but ending up broken and alone. Upton and Savage underline the ways in which Nina chooses her fate with open eyes, rather than being simply a victim; they underscore the insight, not merely the madness, of her final monologue.
Mabel Li, who was excellent in Belvoir’s production of Miss Peony this year, successfully charts Nina’s journey from wide-eyed optimist to crushed romantic; her final scene is devastating.
Nina, amongst this cohort of thwarted dreamers, is the bravest: she dares to pursue her dreams, and she decides to live with the consequences. Nina, like the implacable Australian landscape, weathers every season – and endures.
The Seagull runs at Sydney Theatre Company until 16 December
