Sir Ian McKellen in RSC’s The Seagull
At the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Tony Robinson, Sir Ian McKellen, Getting Married – Part 2
As a result of Frances Barber’s cycling accident here in Stratford earlier in the year The Seagull had been a long time coming, so long in fact that we’d almost lost interest in seeing the play, especially with the wedding approaching at an alarming rate. But go we did, and what a truly wonderful evening in the theatre it turned out to be. And if I hadn’t used the word “wonderful” I’d have had to use the word “superb”.
It was both superb, and wonderful. Okay, so I like using adjectives.
The adorable rusty steel box that is the Courtyard Theatre had a wonderfully strange feel about it too, and the moment you saw the set: where the decaying inside of a large Russian country house met and intertwined with the decaying outside – were in fact interchangeable - you felt as if you’d entered another world (which is what theatre is supposed to do isn’t it), a world of changing values, of hope, yes, but much more one of despair and a dreadful tiredness – of a dwindling, distant power base that no longer has anything to offer or accomplish; which is the essence of Chekov.
Sir Ian MacKellen in The Seagull
My only fear, as I watched the faces of the audience to gauge their reaction, was how could the acting outdo Christopher Oram’s wonderful set? The answer was, easily, because the set - once the actors began to work – was like a signpost, like one of those pointing finger signs that were still around when I was a kid, that, with Neil Austin’s lighting, helped pick out the movement and give a genuine world in which Chekhov and Trevor Nunn, the director, could operate, and into which we, the audience, were very quickly drawn.
In a recent interview Trevor Nunn (who is the epitome of shabby, very shabby, chic believe me) was asked why, when so many versions of Chekov’s plays, especially of The Seagull, already existed, did he decide to make another. He answered…
“ Well, I imagine a host of theatre companies and directors have concluded exactly the same thing or so many versions, published and unpublished, wouldn’t have come into existence for us to leave on the shelf. But I take the point. Is Chekov really open to that much variation? I think the answer is…yes and no. I must confess I don’t like the word or rather the idea of a “version”. Somehow the catch-all category, “version”, allows and even promotes more than just a translation of the original text, and suggests a freedom to edit, re-write, loosely render, modernise and perhaps most common of all, rework in the well known “style” of the dramatist doing the version. Certainly reading The Seagull in many different versions, some English, some American, some Irish, you encounter quite different plays all sharing the central ingredients of one and the same narrative.
“ What we are doing in this production is a translation of Chekov’s play, a translation which has the intention of being as faithful to Chekov’s original text as possible. But how, then, is that fidelity to be measured? The translator is looking always for the “equivalent” – be it in word, phrase or meaning. But equivalence doesn’t stop there. A translation has to find the equivalent construction, the equivalent emphasis in a sentence, the equivalent formality or colloquialism of speech, and perhaps most difficult of all, an equivalent sense of contemporaneity.”
He was then asked if that meant bringing the play up to date, which does suggest the interviewer wasn’t really listening.
“ No. But Chekov hadn’t set out to write a period play when his new form of drama took Moscow by storm in 1895. Nonetheless the earliest “faithful” translations, by such excellent pioneers as Constance Garnett [ she also did one of the earliest translations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace], involve phraseology and vocabulary that read[s] to us now as evidence of the English class system and the social assumptions of a hundred years ago. Nothing dates so quickly and so obviously as a translation. So, in a ‘new’ translation, we must indeed not offend against the fundamental condition that the surrounding circumstances of the play relate to Russia in the 1890s; but Chekov’s characters must communicate in what seems to us in 2007 to be believable and real speech.”
And I think that’s were Nunn loses the plot a bit in his explanation of translation. Constance Garnett’s translation does use the English class system to suggest a similar state of affairs in Russia, of that so called golden period before the First World War, and the less than golden period before the subsequent revolutions. I believe her translation should always be the measuring stick by which others translations are attempted. And Nunn’s second point, that Chekov’s characters must communicate in what seems to us in 2007 to be believable and real speech, is certainly not a theory he would apply to Shakespeare, or anyone else writing in English over the last four hundred years, so why so in translation? The contemporaneity must be with the 1890s, and not the early 21st century; the similarities, if there are any, will speak for themselves, as they constantly do in Shakespeare.
But, having said that, what came about on stage a couple of weeks ago - in what is Nunn’s own translation — is a play that, to me, even though it’s set in Russia, is still all about the English class system, with language that is wonderfully loud and very, very Edwardian, which at times sounds like Somerset Maugham at his best (and he could be good), and at others, a very earnest, very clunky Bernard Shaw. But, in the final analysis, it is the skill and commitment of the actors that makes this piece work, and work so well.
As with all of Nunn’s work – think of Les Miserables for instance – he always tries to create ensemble pieces, where the strength and the energy comes from the group and not so much the individual, which is a worthy aim, and one, in The Seagull, that works well too, that is until Sir Ian McKellen – as Sorin, Arkadina’s brother — slowly wanders on stage looking ever so slightly bewildered and wild of hair, which, for a split second, stops the show in its tracks, and then, by some strange inversion of physical logic pours even more energy into the production, by slowing it down and flattening-out time itself, and by so doing drawing the attention of the audience to himself, and to anyone else he touches or talks too. We became aware, too, of his every movement: of the way he absent-mindedly scratches his leg, pulls up his socks, fumbles with and lights innumerable cigarettes (Sorin is dying of lung cancer), smiles as if to himself, laughs at something only heard by him, and speaks with that wonderful voice that is a mix of the last one hundred and fifty years of the best of British theatre. It was wholly electrifying, and gracious in the extreme, as if one were listening to a great pianist play Chopin, and in a way you’ve never heard before. It was a truly remarkable performance that by itself made sense of Chekov, and of Nunn’s desire to somehow make sense of himself.
The rest of the cast rose admirably to the occasion too, most especially Frances Barber, as Arkadina, who brought out the almost impossible humour; Monica Dolan’s impossible Masha; Gerald Kyd’s wonderfully pompous, and gorgeous Trigorin; Richard Goulding’s almost unbearable Konstantin; and not least Jonathan Hyde ( recently seen on TV as the famous Edwardian barrister, Edward Marshall Hall, in a re-screening of the superb Shadow of the Noose series from the 1980s) as Dr.Dorn, who brought a wonderful swagger to the proceedings.
Not having seen William Gaunt’s performance ( he and McKellen share the part of Siron) the The Seagull we saw was Sir Ian McKellen’s show.
The play now goes on a world wide tour, which includes the US and New Zealand, where that country’s complete smoking ban may cause a few problems for Sir Ian’s chain smoking Siron. The show then ends its tour in the West End of London this autumn/winter.
Check out the RSC site for more information.
Hilary and I should have been going to see Sir Ian McKellen in Trevor Nunn’s production of King Lear at the Courtyard Theatre here in Stratford back in April, but all press tickets were withdrawn after Frances Barber - who plays Goneril - badly injured her knee in a cycling accident. The reason given for the withdrawal is that Frances’s understudy, Melanie Jessop, needs more time to learn the part (plus Barber’s part in The Seagull, which is running alongside in rep) sufficiently well before the press are allowed in to comment, or, alternatively, give Frances longer to recover so that she can take on the part again.