Chekhov’s drama about love and the creative endeavour opens with failure. Konstantin, an aspiring playwright, has put on his first drama for a small audience in this outpost of the Russian countryside. They all scratch their heads at its gnomic abstractions and dismiss it, except for the doctor, Dorn, who is more open-minded: “I didn’t understand it but I will remember it.”
Jamie Lloyd’s radical, stripped-back, strangely gripping production, using Anya Reiss’s cool adaptation, might well be aspiring to Konstantin’s ideal of creating a new theatrical form. This is not Chekhov as we know it, nor theatre as we know it, certainly not in the West End. Its flagrant non-naturalism recalls Lloyd’s roaringly radical Cyrano de Bergerac, with actors arranging and rearranging themselves on plastic chairs and speaking with mics on Soutra Gilmour’s set of woodchip board walls.
Where that show was filled with music, wordplay and an energy that bounced off the stage, this is soft and deliberately soporific, it seems, with some lines murmured and some words swallowed, as if these characters are either engaging in intimate pillow talk or uttering their last words as life drains out of them.
Actors stand almost lifeless, moving forward for a scene and back again. Sometimes they sound dreamy or drunk, other times they look as if they are sleeping in their chairs, or immobilised, not altogether human.
For a play that repeatedly turns over questions about performance, this production enacts those interrogations. Emilia Clarke’s wide-eyed wannabe actor, Nina, speaks of how much performers move their limbs on stage but these real-life counterparts move minimally.
After the interval, the walls are partly removed as if the few traditional theatrical elements that feature are slowly deconstructing around the actors. Were it not so smoothly staged, this might be a rehearsal read-through or scratch night – or even a drama-school experiment. Is it all concept and no solid effects? Sometimes it does feel like we are watching The Seagull With Zombies – mannered, frustrating, both too drawn and drawled out. But it never stops fascinating and in the scenes that work best, this show is brave, compelling and powerful: when Konstantin’s actor mother, Arkadina, tells him he is a “nobody”; when she begs her lover, Trigorin, to stay with her; when Nina and Trigorin simply sit and stare into each other’s eyes at the back of the stage, while a scene occurs at the front.
Clarke is the biggest commercial star and convinces opposite Tom Rhys Harries’s Adonis-like Trigorin but the larger performance comes from Indira Varma as the highly strung mother, who seems the most alive character on stage. Daniel Monks’ Konstantin emanates a morose sleepiness and there is a charismatic supporting turn from Robert Glenister but Sorin feels like too small a part for him – we wish for more and more.
Meanwhile, the comic roles are uniformly excellent: Jason Barnett’s estate manager, Shamrayev, simmers with anger at these indolent townies. Sophie Wu’s show-stealing Masha – one of several characters contending with Chekhov’s typically tortuous pangs of unrequited love – brings emo-teen darkness to the tragicomedy with perfect, deadpan deliveries.
There is sometimes a Beckettian focus on voice, and on facial expressions, which creates a hypnotic focus and we lean in to catch these characters’ intimacies. The spell is broken after the interval, when it begins to feel too still, but this is a maverick show that, like Oklahoma! at the Young Vic, proves how dangerous and daring a revival can be. As Dorn concludes of Konstantin’s play: “It made an impression. I don’t quite know what kind yet.”
At the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 10 September.
