Forming a judgment on any work regarded as a classic by so many can be tricky. Enjoy it, and maybe you are just a conformist. Don’t, and acknowledge the possibility you are the problem.
I get the latter feeling whenever I read Chekhov, one of world literature’s most revered names. His drowsy narratives and lifeless characters leave me so cold. Yet the critical elite extol his plays as spellbinding works of deep emotion and unique stagecraft.
This has confused and annoyed me for quite a while. Yet re-reading his first multi-act and most famous play, The Seagull, something clicked. Not so much that I enjoyed it (I don’t think Chekhov wrote for that purpose), but at least I began to suss out why he matters to so many.
The Seagull is a different kind of drama, one of slow disintegration and quiet revelation. A group of upper-middle class people amuse themselves beside a tranquil lake with idle chat and love affairs. The best of them are miserable; the worst live happily in their ignorance. The play has a meta quality as two of the characters are playwrights and two are actresses, each of them offering widely diverse approaches to their art which they expound upon at length.
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| The entirety of the play is set in and just outside the lakeside villa owned by Sorin, the aging, sickly brother of Madame Arkadina. It is a home of childhood memories and fading grandeur, where people idle away their time playing bingo and having affairs. Photo by Sören Vilks from https://www.charlottehenery.com/the-seagull |
We open at the lakeside manor of the Treplevs. Madame Arkadina, an actress nearly 40, resides there with her new lover, the well-regarded author Trigorin, and her son, Konstantin Treplev, also a writer but just starting out. Young Treplev is debuting a strange play he just wrote, one set in a distant future where nothing is left of the world we know. In this play-within-a-play, a single character appears, played by Nina, a lakeside neighbor who dreams of life on stage.
“Like a prisoner cast into a deep and empty well, I know not where I am or what awaits me,” Nina intones in the play.
All this is too avant-garde for Arkadina, who continually interrupts with complaints and comments until Treplev stops the performance. Arkadina then makes clear she has no time for her son’s “decadent ravings”:
ARKADINA: I don’t mind listening even to raving if it’s a joke, but here we have pretensions to new forms, a new era in art. To my way of thinking this has nothing at all to do with new forms, it’s simply bad temper.
TRIGORIN: Everyone writes as he likes and as he can.
ARKADINA: Let him write as he likes and as he can, so long as he leaves me in peace. [Act I]
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| Annette Bening as Arkadina addresses Elisabeth Moss as Masha, ever in black, in a 2018 film adaptation. Chekhov presents Arkadina as overbearing, but leaves some latitude for the actor. Her character can be likable as well as loathsome. Image from https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/annette-bening-and-production-designer-jane-musky-take-us-behind-the-scenes-of-the-seagull-set |
Arkadina is first-named in the character list and easily the most distinctive personality, a selfish narcissist with flecks of empathy here and there. Her approach to acting seems to be concentrated on keeping her large wardrobe well stocked with costumes, a concern on which she lavishes her vast wealth. Meanwhile, her struggling son Treplev must make do with old clothes as he tries to establish a writing career.
Treplev is the real center of the play, both for his love for Nina and his resentment of Trigorin as a representative of a more established literary order Treplev despises. He is something of a revolutionary.
Chekhov was an iconoclast, too, crafting a new form of drama known as realism. Treplev declares early in the play that “We need new forms,” and inveighs often about popular drama being too conventional in its construction and artificial in its effect.
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| The cottage where Chekhov wrote The Seagull at his Melikovo estate, 40 miles south of Moscow. A persistent question concerns the title: There are no seagulls in this part of Russia. Was something lost in translation? Or was Chekhov being playful? Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melikhovo |
Yet unlike Chekhov, who famously favored realism in theater, Treplev is more of a dreamer, in line perhaps with Chekhov’s Swedish contemporary August Strindberg. Realism is not his thing.
“One must portray life not as it is, and not as it ought to be, but as it appears in our dreams,” Treplev declares. This is exampled in the brief play, a very abstract work which seems to be going nowhere even before Arkadina’s curt interruptions.
Treplev is rather obnoxious, understandably vexed around his cold mother but also openly bitter at her lover Trigorin. The scalding Arkadina calls this jealousy, and she has a point, though Chekhov does present Trigorin as something of a literary lightweight, dashing off clever, popular works between long bouts of fishing and eventually romancing the much younger Nina while Arkadina isn’t looking.
TRIGORIN: A youthful love, alluring, poetic, carrying one off into a world of dreams – the only thing on earth that can give happiness! I have never known a love like that…. In my youth there wasn’t time, I was always haunting the editors’ offices, fighting off poverty…. And now that love has come at last, and is beckoning me…. What sense is there in running away from it? [ACT III]
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| Anna Chancellor as Arkadina and Samuel West as Trigorin in a 2015 production at Chichester Festival Theatre. Trigorin is a successful middle-aged man in a familiar role, weighing his options between a pretty young thing and a clutchy older woman. Photo by Johan Persson from https://britishtheatre.com/review-the-seagull-chichester-festival-theatre-4stars/ |
Spoiler alert: Trigorin does hook up with Nina, only to dump her before Act IV. He proves something of a cad. At the same time, he delivers a profound monologue about the burden of being a great writer, in a way that seems to channel Chekhov’s own feelings about his vocation:
TRIGORIN: I have no rest from myself, and I feel I am consuming my own life, that for the sake of honey I give to someone in a void, I despoil my finest flowers of their pollen, tear them up, trample on their roots. Do you think I am mad? [ACT II]
We encounter a few minor characters in the course of the play. Sorin, Arkadina’s brother, is apparently dying but unable to get a straight answer about his condition. Shamrayev, Sorin’s steward, looks after the manor while his wife, Polina, carries on an affair with Dorn, a doctor.
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| How sick is Sorin? Chekhov suggests he is at death's door, but is vague on details. In this 2014 Santa Paula Theater production, Doug Friedlander gave the role a comedic focus that one review called "very funny." On the page, his is a more inert role of heavy pathos. Photo by Brian Stetham from https://archive.vcstar.com/entertainment/theater-review-the-seagull-at-santa-paula-theater-center-ep-458782234-351388491.html |
Masha, the daughter of Shamrayev and Polina, longs for Treplev but settles on Medvedenko the schoolmaster. The play opens with this famous exchange between them:
MEDVEDENKO: Why do you always wear black?
MASHA: I am in mourning for my life. I am unhappy. [ACT I]
None of the minor characters amount to much on their own, and seem superfluous to Chekhov’s design. But they offer some modest contrast to the main tale.
The Seagull is billed as a comedy, but as with Chekhov’s other, later comedy The Cherry Orchard, it is hard finding any humor, unless it be schadenfreude over the sufferings of the idle rich and near-rich. Perhaps this was a reason Chekhov was so favored in the former Soviet Union.
That said, The Seagull did engage me for the first time, at least in the first three acts. The one-sided tension between Treplev and Trigorin and the exasperating self-absorption of Arkadina are fascinating to watch in real-time. Love is capably presented as a form of torture all people endure, one way or another. Masha puts it like this in the final act: “When love plants itself in your heart, you have to clear it out.”
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| Nina (Adelayo Adedayo) tries to return a dead seagull to Treplev (Brian Vernel) in a modernized 2017 Lyric Hammersmith production in London. Basically, the play consists of a succession of failed romances, without any sense of hope. Typical Chekhov, in other words. Image from https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/seagull-lyric-hammersmith-review-%E2%80%93-lesley-sharps-irina-sex-addict |
The ending still struck me as an anticlimax, even as I was more engaged by the proceedings. I had forgotten that Treplev enjoys some professional success as a writer between Acts III and IV, and how his relationship with Nina is reestablished in the play’s tragic conclusion. I found myself caring when the two were reunited, hoping something positive might occur even as I knew it would not.
There is nothing sportive to be found in the play. Nina gives a powerful speech of hope and endurance, but more for the sense that she is kidding herself. She may struggle making it as an actress in provincial productions, but at least her motives are more authentic than Arkadina’s!
In
the end, Chekhov was an artist of despair. As with The Three Sisters,
you get in The Seagull a work that probes the darkness of the human
condition in a way that is rather sad yet somehow not disappointing.
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