A new Seagull lands in Regent’s Park. Director Matthew Dunster has lured Chekhov’s classic into a leafy corner of north London to see if it needs an upgrade. The new script, by yuppie-baiting playwright Torben Betts, is casual, slangy and sometimes gauche. Favourite moments have been struck out including the great opening line, ‘Why do you always wear black?’ And Betts decides to make Chekhov’s characters swear. ‘Bollocks’, ‘piss off’. I don’t know Russian but I’m sure Chekhov didn’t need coarse language to portray coarse souls.
The outside staging has been jazzed up too. A clunking great mirror hangs over the playing area like a bit of broken satellite. Angled at 45 degrees, it reflects a bird’s-eye view of the stage towards the stalls. Very odd but it works. It helps amplify the sound too. And sound is a big thing in this show. The busy recording track delivers ear-boggling whoomps of noise without warning or motive, as if a baby at the mixing-desk were pressing a button marked ‘Thunder Clap’. And Dunster aims for voiceover effects by playing recordings of some speeches over the loudhailers. So the poor old actor on stage, rather than delivering the lines, has to pretend to ‘muse silently’ by turning towards us and assuming a ruminative frown, with a hand rising slowly to the chin as a finishing touch.
The location works well early on. Kostya, in the opening scene, stages his pretentious play outdoors at sunset. And here we are outdoors at sunset. Perfect. But the rewards dwindle as dusk falls and the play moves to new emotional registers. The final scene is set in mid-winter with a storm howling and banging at the windows. The weather is effectively a character in the scene, announcing that destruction is at hand.
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