Well, lat week I saw "the Seagull" on Broadway. It starred Kristin Scott Thomas (with Peter Sarsgaard left) and it is a famous Chekhov play..
To which one must say, well attention must be paid. With that kind of pedigree, it should be faboo yes? No.
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Do not count me as a giant fan of the famous Russian Anton Chekhov. The play is, at a literal level, the story of a famous actress and her interactions with her son, her lover, her brother and her son's girlfriend.
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Although the pictures don't really do it justice, Kristin ST is amazing. She brings a lively performance that is captivating. One can't say heart warming, since it isn't entirely clear she has a heart.
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The rest of the play is a tough slog. My guess is that this is as funny and fun as Chekhov will ever be (bar a parody, which I could see as a raucous good time).
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Suffice it to say, not so fun.
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Peter Sarsgaard (or the director) seem to have misread the actor's directions from "Stoic" to "Comatose". The man, arguable a great actor normally, is here a great pile of whiskered boredom. A black hole of interest, who's dynamic personality is suppose to drive the action. He is a great writer who womanizes and fishes - and does neither particularly well.
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I assume (or hope) that it is all metaphorical for the bourgeoisie of Russia or something. Because otherwise it is rather painful disappointment. Every person longs for someone else, and is longed for by yet another person. So A loves B who loves C who loves D and so on.
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The "moral" -as it were- seems to be that love sucks, so ignore it. If you indulge, you indulge at your peril (death, lose of child, lose of family... this and many more in Chekhov's witty comedy "The Seagull").
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I would assume that is deeper than I understand, and yet maybe not. The "Seagull" of the title is an actual bird. Kristin ST's son kills the bird and present it as a gift to his girlfriend. There is some boring why explanation, but it is really just there so he can leave and Peter Sarsgaard (the mother's lover) can walk by and talk to the girlfriend. He says something fairly obvious and annoying about how the young man finds beauty and kills it, where he finds beauty and worships it. To which I think, "Ah, this is where Steven Speilberg learned his feather light touch with metaphors."
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In between Acts 1 and 2 Peter and the girlfriend shack up, have a baby, lose the baby and break up. In Act 2 (which might as well have big letters "EIGHT YEARS LATER") Peter is back with Kristin. As you might have guessed, it is beyond me why anyone would want to be with the dullard.
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The son has, in the intervening 8 years, given up trying to forge a new artist vision and has stooped to writing middlebrow short stories and novels. He is fabulously successful and fabulously pained by the success. Oye, I'm bourgeoise.
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It is, in short, the play is a love letter to unrequited and misunderstood artistic vision. It is, in even shorter, annoying.
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More annoying that it goes on and on and on. As my Grandfather said, it passed an a lot of good places to stop.
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To top it off, the names are (really) :
- Irina Nikolayevna Arkadina — an actress
- Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplyov — her son, a playwright
- Peter Sorin — Arkadina's brother
- Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaya — daughter of a rich landowner
- Ilya Afanasyevich Shamrayev — retired lieutenant, manager of Sorin's estate
- Polina Andryevna — his wife
- Masha — their daughter
- Boris Alexeyevich Trigorin — a well-known novelist
- Yevgeny Sergeyevich Dorn — a doctor
- Semyon Semyonovich Medvedenko — a teacher
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To which I say, Oye. Enough already.