By happenstance or design, post-pandemic Toronto is the city of Chekhov. The Russian playwright – who writes of love, loss, longing and the struggle to find meaning and purpose in life; and who sheathes these weighty themes in tragicomic uncertainty – is enjoying a moment.
Last fall, we enjoyed the monumental Uncle Vanya at Crow’s Theatre – a production that leaned in with meticulous specificity to the play’s Russian setting. Shortly after, The Howland Company’s Three Sisters (directed by Paolo Santalucia) took a realistic, modernized approach that severed the play from a specific place and time.
Now – at last – we have Soulpepper’s 3 years-delayed The Seagull, directed by Daniel Brooks and based on a new adaptation by Simon Stephens. And Brooks and team (including Santalucia in a starring role) go furthest yet in this Chekhov mini-renaissance by delivering an untethered and imaginative postmodern production.
The Seagull is a play filled with drama, humour, and more tangled and inescapable relationship issues than a reality TV show. And from the start, Brooks’ abstract staging suggests that there is as much objective reality in the characters’ interpersonal pyrotechnics as there is in an expertly edited season of Temptation Island or Too Hot to Handle.
The back of the stage is a translucent plastic sheet. Handyman Jacob (Dan Mousseau) opens the play – with a broad wink – by affixing the label “Lake” to it. In keeping with this abstract aesthetic, the set is minimalist and functional, consisting of plastic objects and simple chairs and towels, with heat lamps used at one point to represent the sun. Between scenes, we see the characters choreographing and co-creating the set changes with the plastic props.
We’re as far as you can get from the verisimilitude of a Russian estate. The stage is an imagination-space, where we will watch these characters conceive, bring into existence, and live out intense emotional realities that are – in reality – as plastic and in need of imaginary supplementation as the “lake”.
The superb cast more than rises to this challenging task. With fearless abandon and sometimes-pathological intensity, they act their convoluted relationship dynamics into intense, arresting life. Konstantin Treplyov (a movingly tortured Santalucia) is a passionate young writer desperately trying to make a name for himself. He’s in love with Nina (Hailey Gillis), a naive and ambitious young would-be actress, who is arguably more interested in fame than in him.
Nina, in turn, is adored by Boris Trigorin (a quietly calculating Raoul Bhaneja). Trigorin is a successful older writer stuck in a loveless affair with the self-absorbed aging actress Irina Arkadina (a scenery-chewing Michelle Monteith). Irina is too self-absorbed to pay more than intermittent attention to anyone else’s problems, including those of Trigorin, whom she can see is drifting away, and son Konstantin, who resents her for not supporting his art.
And this chain of romantic entanglement extends further. Masha (a palate-cleansing, straight-shooting Ellie Ellwand) is the garbed-in-black daughter of estate manager Leo (Randy Hughson). While she carries an unrequited torch for Konstantin, she is herself the unrequited love object of local school teacher Simeon (Farhang Ghajar). Finally, Masha’s mother and Leo’s wife Paulina (Robyn Stevan) pursues an extramarital affair with an emotionally distant doctor Hugo (Diego Matamoros).
Peter Sorin (a twinkling, winningly crotchety Oliver Dennis) is the only character who is romantically unaffiliated. The brother of Irina and uncle of Konstantin, he is the owner of the estate-cum-imagination space where the events of the play occur – and he is also the most static character. For the plot of The Seagull charts the evolution of these other characters’ romantic entanglements and complex interactions in an escalating series of absurdly comic moments.
The actors go big – sometimes absurdly big – and we laugh with pleasure at the overwrought emotions in which they wallow.
And yet . . . at the exact same time, we see them. We feel the validity and truth of the feelings they have conjured. We sympathize with them.
The histrionics are ridiculous. And they’re deeply moving.
It’s a remarkable feat.
Gillis as Nina is riveting. She enters the stage on a scooter, then plays her part in Konstantin’s play – a play which he hopes will be his big break – with wide-eyed wonder and childlike commitment. Mounting an absurdly tiny stage armed with dreams that fill the larger Soulpepper stage to bursting, she delivers a performance that is equal parts magic and absurdity – and that is balanced by the devastating groundedness of her final speech in the play’s second half. Santalucia’s tortured Konstantin is her mesmerizing, flailing opposite number – in one memorable sequence, they strike each other like Elaine and Jerry from Seinfeld. And Monteith’s Irina, always garbed in red, is compulsively watchable in a mercurial performance that is by turns laconic and lacerating, commonsensical and cunning.
In Matamoras’ Hugo, we find an empathetic, plain-talking and low-key place to try to anchor ourselves as an audience. In a world of such extreme characters, we gravitate to the calm of his voice and the apparent compassion of his perspective. And yet . . . he’s involved in his own romantic affair. And his clear-eyed, calm actions are in their own way as consequential and destructive as those of his melodramatic fellows.
As time moves on, the romantically affiliated characters make weighty choices about the emotional lives which we have watched them conjure into being on this slender set. And these choices have consequential consequences. A second plastic sheet reduces the set for Act II to a claustrophobic half-size – and it is as if the space for imaginative possibility is reduced accordingly, inflecting those consequences with tragedy. The most dire are life-ending. Others are merely joy-ending: returns to the status quo or surrenders to certainty. Still others are simply . . . uncertain.
This dynamic pairing of sparse staging with full-to-bursting performances suggests that we make up the things that bring us joy and fuel our aspirations — just as we make up the constraints that limit our possibilities. And these things we make up? They are utterly, gorgeously real.
It’s absurd, yet moving. Ridiculous, yet beautiful.
Like life.
Soulpepper Theatre’s production of The Seagull has been extended until May 7, 2023. Reserve tickets on soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2023
