Theatre reviews: The Seagull | Flick & Pie Go Fishing
With powerful acting and a nuanced script for today, this Seagull is a gem, writes Joyce McMillan
The Seagull, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★
Flick & Pie Go Fishing, Oran Moor, Glasgow ★★★
Love is the greatest thing, the oldest and the latest thing; but it surely can bring great pain as well as joy, as it drives us onward through life. No writer ever understood this paradox better than Anton Chekhov; and in James Brining’s opening production as artistic director of the Lyceum Theatre, all the gorgeous human nuances of Chekhov’s vision are explored, and subtly made to connect with our 21st century lives, in a version of Chekhov’s 1896 play The Seagull that is as funny as it is moving, and completely absorbing, throughout its two hours and 40 minutes.
It’s not that there is any overt updating of the play, either in Madeleine Boyd’s costumes, or in Colin Richmond’s beautiful open set design, with its sense of a rushy water’s edge, and lakeside light. Mike Poulton’s version of the text, though, is brilliantly vibrant, witty and speakable for 21st century actors, responding strongly to Chekhov’s vein of genial yet hard-hitting humour. And at the centre of this production stands Lorn Macdonald’s powerful and heartbreaking performance as Konstantin, the brutally unhappy son of ageing actress Arkadina; a portrait of a young man cruelly let down by a self-indulgent older generation, that might have been written for our time.
Macdonald is fully matched by a magnificent Caroline Quentin, who relishes the full comic potential of Arkadina’s absurd self-absorption, while never losing sight of her deep if unreliable vein of maternal tenderness, and her raw fear of a future without youth or beauty; and by Harmony Rose-Bremner as Konstantin’s love Nina, who abandons him after falling passionately in love with Arkadina’s young lover, the writer Trigorin. And these three are supported by a flawless, witty and pitch-perfect Lyceum ensemble, including Forbes Masson as the doctor who secretly loves Arkadina, John Bett as Arkadina’s elderly brother who never finds love at all, Steven McNicoll as the horrible estate manager Shamrayev, Irene Allan as Shamrayev’s wife who adores the doctor, Tallulah Greive as their daughter Masha who hopelessly loves Konstantin, and Michael Dylan as Masha’s doting but despised husband.
The Seagull is also, of course, a play about theatre, as poor Konstantin desperately tries to reinvent an art-form that he feels his mother’s generation are strangling to death; his strange play about a world without humans, 200,000 years from now, sounds as if it could have been written last week, in our age of ecological crisis. And many of the reactions to it, too, sound strangely familiar; in a world that is always changing, but – as Chekhov knew, and as this fine production fully understands – always involves a tragi-comic struggle for fulfilment, through love, through art, or even through theatre itself.
At Oran Mor, meanwhile, associate director Laila Noble also offers a love story in Flick & Pie Go Fishing – and one in which, for once, the leading couple are happily in love with one another. Flick and Pie still face challenges, though, as they navigate a real-life relationship that began online, negotiating both others’ reactions to Pie’s non-binary status, and the class difference that threatens to divide them even more seriously.
The class tension comes to a head when Pie’s dad beats Pie up, and Pie refuses to inform the police. Matters are not improved by the arrival in accident and emergency of Flick’s overbearing middle-class mum, who just can’t stop patronising Pie; and Noble’s 70 minute play – 10 minutes longer than the Play, Pie, Pint norm – tends to go around in circles, repeatedly asking whether love will be enough to see Flick and Pie through.
The situation is strong, though, and the writing often witty and touching; and Stephanie McGaraidh and Afton Moran deliver two delightful central performances as Flick and Pie, leading to what looks, by the final scene, like a very un-Chekhovian happy ending.
The Seagull is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 1 November; Flick & Pie Go Fishing, run ended
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