Senior play brings Chekhov's The Seagull to Shrewsbury

“And nothing really happens…it’s just people talking…”

Chekhov wrote The Seagull in 1895, the first of his four great naturalistic plays. Although it ultimately revolutionised the theatre, it was at first met with bemusement by the critics. Rather than trying to put the epic and melodramatic on stage, Chekhov simply held a mirror up to his audience – ordinary, middle class people living lives of quiet desperation.

In The Seagull, a group of people find themselves on a country estate over the course of a long, hot, boring summer. They argue, they drink too much and they fall in love with the wrong people. The play is as simple, and as complex, as that.

The estate is owned by Irina Arkadina, a famous actress with an enormous reputation and an even more enormous ego. Hattie A (G, UVI) captured both Arkadina’s charisma and her monstrous arrogance, particularly in the opening scene where Arkadina returns home for the summer with her latest lover, a novelist called Alexei Trigorin, in tow. The selfish and manipulative Alexei, casually destroying the women around him, was played with quiet intensity by Oscar N (Ch, UVI). Brad Fenton’s stunning set design immersed the audience into the world of nineteenth century Russia. The actors, in their muted costumes of blue and cream, drifted through Arkadina’s drawing room like figures from Whistler’s paintings.

Meanwhile, Arkadina’s son, Konstantin, is desperate to become a writer but his revolutionary writing style is belittled and misunderstood by his mother and her friends. Konstantin is in love with Nina, a girl from a nearby estate who longs to escape to the big city and become a famous actress like Arkadina. Sammy P (Ch, UVI) and Poppy G (MSH, UVI) were brilliant as the idealistic young couple; the final scene, when the heartbroken Nina returns to the estate, was emotionally devastating.

They are surrounded by a cast of sharply observed and profoundly human characters: the lovelorn Masha, spiralling into addiction (Pippa L-S, G, V), her unhappily married parents (Rachel W, EDH UVI and Will H, Ch, LVI), the philandering doctor (Massimo W, R, UVI) cynical school teacher (Will O’H, Ch, V) and the trio of servants (Daisy S (G, UVI), Faye P (G, LVI) and Emily M (MSH, UVI)).

Chekhov’s brilliance comes from the way he observes the minutiae of real life – sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, he is always painfully honest. In ‘The Seagull’, the playwright’s perspective is articulated on stage by the character of Sorin – recast here as Serena (Clara G, G, LVI). Humorous, tolerant and wise, she treats her family’s frailties with a wry mixture of affection and exasperation and reminds us that – despite everything – ‘we still need theatre.’

Dr Helen Brown

Director of Drama/ Deputy Head (Co-Curricular)