Chekhov with modern slang? It ain’t a good idea

THE Seagull was Chekhov’s Hamlet. It is a very Russian version, from 1895, about a struggling writer whose diva mother has a dodgy relationship with a novelist who seduces her son’s girlfriend. It was partly a satire on the artistic sterility of the period, a demand for greater vitality in theatre and an elegy to the quiet desperation of provincial life. It ends in a suicide. This new version, with Janie Dee as the mother, goes big on the characters’ self-absorption in all its colours — anguish, boorishness, vanity, selfloathing. But Torben Betts’s ‘version’ also drags the dialogue into modern vernacular, with the son telling his mother ‘you know where you can shove your self-pity’. One suspects Chekhov’s pince-nez might have slipped from his snout at this point, but the idea is to restore the snarl at the heart of his play. Yet, the most striking thing about Matthew Dunster’s production is Jon Bausor’s design. He sets a gigantic mirror over the stage, looming above the actors and giving a dislocated God-like view of the action. The visual effect is impressive, but the play itself is rendered somewhat flippant and declamatory, indulging the very melodrama it mocks. Characters’ thoughts are played over a Tannoy, and sniggers continually interjected from minor characters. Despite all this and the heavy-metal chords struck between scenes, it is dressed in period costume. The result is neither museum piece nor modern satire. Janie Dee remains within her comfort zone as the histrionic mother. Alex Robertson, as her toyboy novelist, is not someone to go silly over and anyway, Sabrina Bartlett as the naive teenage beauty who falls for him is too self-possessed to be properly starstruck. Matthew Tennyson burns bright as the skinny, tortured son — and you wish he would eat more lunch, and return the love of an adoring and agonising Lisa Diveney. Colin Hoult is the village bore — a teacher who everyone cuts short. He could be Chekhov himself, trying to get a word in edgeways. And his advice might be that if we really want to lament our own times, we should find a play of our own.