Alastair Macaulay is struck by Cate Blanchett in The Seagull

Alastair Macaulay reviews:

Two by Chekhov – The Three Sisters (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, playing to April 19); The Seagull (Barbican Theatre, to April 5)

No foreign playwright returns to the London stage more often than Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), especially in his four classics: “The Seagull”, “Uncle Vanya”, “The Three Sisters”, and “The Cherry Orchard”. The characters of these great plays are variously poised between optimism and despair, between the senses that the world is changing in important ways and that nothing will ever change for people, and between the ways in which characters connect with one another while remaining self-absorbed.

Eminent British playwrights – Michael Frayn, David Hare, Tom Stoppard – have applied themselves to translating him. And so many of our foremost directors have staged one or more of his best-known plays that I’m surprised that the industrious Nicholas Hytner, now in his late sixties, has not yet tackled even one.

Many of our leading actors have not only found rewarding roles in his plays but have returned to the same play to tackle different parts. (I’ve seen Ian McKellen play both Dr Dorn and Sorin in “The Seagull”. In different filmed performances of “The Cherry Orchard”, you can see Judi Dench play both Anya and her mother Mme Ranevskaya.) No surprise that the exceptional Andrew Scott recently played most of the “Vanya” characters in a one-man production: this harmless idea added to nobody’s understanding of the play (though it enjoyably showed off Scott’s versatility). And Chekhov’s characters are so rounded, so rewarding, that it’s easy to emerge from a production talking of not the leading two or four actors but of a half-dozen others, too.

Two new London productions show contrasting possibilities. Caroline Steinbeis’s staging of “The Three Sisters,” simply but attractively outfitted by Oli Townsend in the couture of this 1901 play’s era, beautifully showcases the marvellous acoustics of the three-tier Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the candlelit indoor house that’s part of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Because of the costumes, it’s tempting to call this a “traditional” production – though actually it’s not. Ideally, Chekhov needs a stage twice the size of this one, a stage that allows three different things to happen at the same time in different areas. A great Chekhov staging should always demonstrate fascinating asymmetries, whereas plenty here happens on the centreline simply for reasons of limited space. This version is thrillingly intimate – but there isn’t room even for the sisters’ brother Andrei (Stuart Thompson) to push the pram with his baby, an element specified by Chekhov.

Chekhov is forever being retranslated. Rory Mullarkey’s version plays well, with only one jarring feature: both the three sisters and their increasingly irksome sister-in-law Natalya call one another “My lovely” (or “My lovelies”), a term of endearment that sounds better from the socially insensitive Natalya than from the family into which she marries.

As so often in Chekhov, the characters of “The Three Sisters” all reflect the frustrations of unfulfilled hopes and ambitions. The sisters’ famous longing to go to Moscow – they never do – is just the most haunting sign that this play is about those who cannot take control of their destinies. Michelle Terry (also artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe) plays the unmarried oldest sister Olga with great attack and easy authority. Even if Olga is surprised that she becomes headmistress (the main reason she never moves to Moscow), we’re not. She’s so capable; but her capability has landed her with the fate she never wanted.

Shannon Tarbet plays the married Masha with a surprising degree of immature girlishness: she knows she once married Kulygin (Kier Charles) just because he seemed so brainy, but it’s possible she now falls in love with Vershinin (the marvellous Paul Ready) just because he’s a lame duck, a social problem. Although Irina is the youngest sister, Ruby Thompson makes her the most poignant, multifaceted, large-spirited character. She wants to work, and cannot yet believe that work may not solve her problems. She wants to fall in love, and weeps that this famous emotion has never come her way. The most resigned character onstage is old Chebutykin, played with marvellous calm and humanity by Peter Wight. No aspect of the play here is forced, but innumerable details grasp the heart.

At the Barbican, Duncan Macmillan and Thomas Ostermeier have updated “The Seagull” with references to Zelensky and Ian McEwan. Ostermeier directs, so that, in an already amplified production, characters speak into stage microphones as if wanting publicity. And Marg Horwell’s designs place the actress Irina Arkádina (Cate Blanchett) in sunglasses and jumpsuits. Ostermeier follows Stanislavsky’s precedent in starting the play with a strong soundtrack of local wildlife. (I immediately remembered how Chekhov wrote that he would set his next play in a country with no insects.)

Blanchett’s beauty is theatre in itself. And those who have not seen her onstage before may be surprised by how, unlike any actors best known on screen, she is intensely theatrical, projecting voice and body language expertly into a large auditorium. In such earlier vehicles as David Hare’s “Plenty” and Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar named Desire”, she was actually far too artificially grandiloquent. In “The Seagull”, however, playing an actress, she has a whale of a time, using private life as forms of audition, rehearsal, and stage repertory.

The first two of the play’s four acts are terrific fun here. Arkádina is by no means the only self-dramatising character: we can’t help but enjoy how the gangly and melancholy Masha (Tanya Reynolds) soon proves to be very much the actress in her entrances, exits, and uses of the microphone. Likewise Arkádina’s son Konstantin (Kodi Smit McPhee) often performs theatrically even in terms of his own private life. He’s making effects; we can’t be sure how sincere they are. The writer Trigorin (Tom Burke) is the opposite: very un-stagey, marvellously unselfconscious even in his most artful statements of self-awareness. (But I wish that Ostermeier had directed McPhee and Burke to project words better. Though they’re miked, they sometimes gobble their diction.)

Alas, Ostermeier’s clever-clever production runs out of steam after the interval. Nina (Emma Corrin) and Konstantin are usually the play’s most movingly vulnerable characters. In Act Four, where they should be at their most desperately unhappy, they made little impression. Here they’re interesting, watchable, but unmoving. We all hear the extra-loud gunshot that proves to have been Konstantin’s offstage suicide – but the quiet final scene in which some characters explain that he’s dead is fumbled and rushed.

On press night, Blanchett seemed to have a bad memory lapse during her big Act Three scene with Trigorin. Yet, amid the multi-layered artifice of this production, it was hard to be sure that this, too, wasn’t another effect. Chekhov is already a master of layering: “The Seagull” not only has a strong interplay between “life” (loves requited, unrequited, and interrupted) and “art” (plays and theatricality). By trying to add even more layers, making characters address various publics, Ostermeier paradoxically diminishes Chekhov.

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