The Seagull
Royal Court, London SW1
The Seagull is the best play ever written about writers and actors. Chekhov's first great drama - which both debates and demonstrates new forms of theatre and new ideas of personality - was as startling in 1896 as Look Back in Anger was 60 years later, and far more long-lasting in its influence. So it's a resonant choice - about newness, while not being new - for Ian Rickson's farewell production as artistic director of the Royal Court, and Rickson does it proud: this is an evening of sombreness and sudden hilarity, and of exquisitely detailed characterisation. The cast - several of whom are more often seen on big and small screens than on the stage - is glorious.
The opening sequence sets the tone. At first, all is dulcet, dreamy slowness. Hildegard Bechtler's dark wood design has the colour of seagull feathers, as do the garments of the actors, who amble on to the stage, in their greys and blacks, through a clump of silver birches. Along with a scatter of birdsong, there is a faint humming in the air: a far-off, harp-like vibration. None of this is derivative, but it's an immediately recognisable Chekhovian universe.
And then the familiarity fractures. The opening line of The Seagull is one of the best-known, most often quoted of theatrical questions. 'Why,' prickly, snuff-sniffing Masha is asked by the man who will become her husband (one of those sad, dull dogs that Chekhov shackles to his cleverest women), 'do you always wear black?' At least that's what normally happens. Here, he gets only halfway through the second word when he's interrupted by an impatient sweep of the hand from his future wife. It's a tiny fracture, but the surprise of it turns dolefulness into comedy. It also prefigures in a flash both the hopelessness of the couple's marriage and the wild grumpiness of Katherine Parkinson's Masha, a woman who's worth a play of her own.
This is a drama which touches on the perils of celebrity - through its famous author, his successful actress lover, a struggling young playwright and a doomed young actress - and yet, as in any good Chekhov production, the celebrities don't run away with the show: the focus of attention constantly shifts from character to character; Chekhov is the most democratic of playwrights.
Still, it's true that it would be worth seeing for Kristin Scott Thomas alone. Over the last several years she's proved a strong presence on the stage - in Pirandello's As You Desire Me and in Three Sisters. She proves herself all over again now, much helped by the excellent new version - idiomatic but stately - provided by Christopher Hampton. With what cutting complacency she tells Nina, just after she's seen her perform in Konstantin's disastrously pretentious play: 'I'm sure you must be talented.' Or eyes up her frock: 'Aren't you a clever girl?' Her restraint is more singular than her explosions (the scene in which she re-seduces her young lover is dodgily boisterous). Her militant elegance - the moulded hair, which she pats as she delivers a barb, the tightly belted waist around which her hand hovers, just checking - is, like so much about her, ambiguous. It's a display of self-control, but also a sign of anxiety: this is a woman who lives in fear that her allure is fading.
What chance, you might think, does Carey Mulligan as Nina have alongside this performance. As it turns out, a big one. This young star in the making seems to have a special Mulligan machine which takes the nauseatingness out of the idea of 'dewy'. She is here - as she was in her ingenue role in the Almeida's Hypochondriac - quite extraordinarily radiant and frank. She even manages to make moving the near dead duck of a scene in which, rejected and on the brink of madness, she has to flap around trying to decide whether or not she thinks of herself as a seagull. It's heart-wrenching to watch her being dazzled by the writer Trigorin, who's played by Chiwetel Ejiofor as a quiet obsessive, the more lethal because he's not malicious, just totally self-obsessed.
Chekhov's picture of the scavenging nature of the celebrity writer and actor is imperishable. The aspiring author Konstantin has his one chance of glory blighted in an almost throwaway moment: Trigorin hands him a magazine in which both men have published stories; Konstantin sees that the celeb has read his own story, but 'he hasn't even cut the pages of mine'. Here, and throughout, Mackenzie Crook as Konstantin turns himself from the creep of The Office into something more desperate: wispy and wired up, he's a young man hooked on recognition; sharp enough to see his own shortcomings as a writer, and not gifted enough to put them right.
The range of interpretations is some indication of The Seagull's capacious brilliance. At the National last year, Katie Mitchell directed a wrongly excoriated production which illuminated the weirdness of Chekhov's characters with a staging so hectic that everyone seemed rocked by a collective nervous breakdown. Rickson's production is more traditional, but none the less thrilling. Its success flies in the face of the play's history. At the premiere in St Petersburg, it was greeted with jeers and sniggers: the playwright, exiting before the end, tramped the streets till the small hours and declared: 'Never again will I write plays or have them produced.' Two years later, when The Seagull was put on in Moscow, the cast were so nervous that they all took valerian drops to calm down. Rickson's cast will have no need of such bolstering: their Seagull is already flying.
Is it worth flocking to The Seagull? You have your say ...
Paolo Morena
30, playwright
Kristin Scott Thomas is very powerful when she takes to the stage. She doesn't seem to have a problem with any kind of role. As for Mackenzie Crook I'm really impressed - he silenced the audience when he walked on.
Fenella Fielding
Actress
The performances were wonderful and the director was wonderful. It looked marvellous. No, it was the best I've seen it. The shifts in tone were handled brilliantly. One accepted everything as it came. The new translation worked terribly well.
Fiona Victory
54, actress
It was exceptionally well cast. I loved all the performances. The balance between the farcical and the sad was very good and I found it very moving. We are all ridiculous when we're in pain, or immature, or long for the inaccessible.
Guiliano Zampi
53, architect
The new translation is spot-on - it felt very modern but didn't veer away too much from the original text. The funniest Seagull I've seen. It brought out how people who take life so frivolously can be so cruel to those who are seriously in love.
Dinah Wood
35, publisher
I was just enraptured, throughout. I really thought it was enchanting and moving. I could find no criticism.
· Interviews by Tancred Newbury
