Theatre
The Seagull (Barbican) The Sisterhood (Chichester) Telling Tales (King's Head)
Delicate desolation
Christopher Edwards
Terry Hands's excellent valedictory pro- duction for the RSC has transferred to London from Stratford. The quality of the ensemble work — an essential element in Chekhov — is particularly good. As every- one remarks these days, Chekhov described The Seagull as a comedy. Terry Hands catches the work's humour. But there is always, throughout Chekhov's work, a sense of delicate desolation. You may laugh at the characters' inability to see beyond their immediate preoccupations, but pathos and despair (cruelty too) are hauntingly present.
The design, by Johan Engels, creates a suggestive lakeside setting complete with silver birches. You really do sense, as the wind flaps about the curtain of poor Kon- statin's open-air stage, that there, just out of sight, is the lake. This subtle evocation of nature by artifice goes to the heart of Chekhov's style.
The whole cast is first-rate. Simon Russel Beale as Konstantin is a bottled-up, tantrum-throwing young man. His own sense of how far short he falls of his ambi- tions is acutely registered and heart-break- ing to watch. Susan Fleetwood's Madam Arkadina was the talking-point of the pro-
duction when it first opened at Stratford. Few critics warmed to her overplaying of Konstantin's actress mother. In London the interpretation seems muted but still self- consciously theatrical — how else can you play her? I thought that her pose-striking sense of melodrama went very much to the heart of this vain, histrionic egotist.
The rest of the cast is excellent too, notably Roger Allam's Trigorin, Amanda Root's Nina and John Carlisle's Dr Dorn. A sure sign of the director's confident artistry is the sense you have of each char- acter being brought effortlessly into focus at key moments of their development and then shifting gently to the margin as anoth- er part of the action unfolds. This is a fine and moving production of a great work, and a splendid way for Terry Hands to sign off.
At Chichester there is a fine and funny adaptation by Ranjit Bolt of Moliere's Les Femmes Savantes. The production makes you laugh from start to finish. The original is a satire on bluestockings and salon life in French society circa 1672. Bolt has updated the jokes about literary criticism to include • well-directed barbs at Derrida and Dworkin.
Despite the intellectual aspirations of her radical mother, aunt and sister, Moliere's heroine Henriette (Serena Gor- don) wants to make a love match with the simple, fun-loving motor-biker Clitandre. The 'sisterhood' wants her to pair off with an appalling pseud of a poet. There are some excellent dirty jokes in Bolt's version as well as a high-spirited and cutting assault on affectation. Most importantly, the production is energetic, superbly acted and good fun. At the King's Head Theatre in Islington the Besht Tellers are staging a series of sto- ries based on Jewish folklore. Musical accompaniment on a fiddle is deployed to underscore the wisdom stored up in these cautionary, morally instructive little fables. This is a slight but engaging entertainment.
'Oh no! We've had buglers.'
Previous page
